Daniel Kaplan (Macalester College and US Air Force Academy)
Abstract
Description: In 2015, USCOTS pioneer George Cobb wrote that "never in my professional lifetime has there been such a need to rethink our curriculum from the ground up, starting necessarily with alternatives to the former consensus introductory course." This workshop presents my own rethought introductory course and all the classroom-tested materials needed to teach it. The course emphasizes statistical methods that can guide action in the world; it engages causality, prediction, and the genuine comparison of hypotheses. The course includes an introduction to data wrangling and visualization. Regression modeling is the primary descriptive tool, streamlining and unifying settings for inference while highlighting the "multivariable thinking" emphasized in the GAISE report. The controversy over p-values is dealt with constructively, avoiding student misconceptions by putting p-values in the role of a screening test.
The course includes computing with R but uses a core of only a dozen functions. Participants with R experience will leave the workshop ready and equipped to teach the class. Others will see how to clear out space from the cluttered introductory curriculum to allow room for important topics that have been excluded for too long. The course materials are free and online at https://dtkaplan.github.io/USCOTS-2023-workshop/.