Using cooperative learning to teach statistics

Mosteller noted the paucity of studies on "how to improve collegiate or university teaching in a behavioral way," and offered examples of techniques that he had found effective in the classroom. Stimulated by Mosteller's suggestions and by research results on "cooperative learning", I adopted new procedures for teaching an introductory undergraduate course in psychological statistics and compared results with those from the course that I had taught by more conventional methods in prior years. A Letter to the Editor in The American Statistician provides a summary of findings. That letter is reproduced (with the permission of the publisher) on the facing page. The present report provides a more complete description of the methods employed, with the intent that it may facilitate their use by others.