By Julianna Drew (University of Illinois)
Information
Any new technology can help improve efficiency, if properly harnessed. How we can harness AI for teaching statistics? In this session we share how we’ve incorporated Rtutor.AI into weekly assignments for a large (N=1099) general education introductory level statistics service course. Rtutor.AI is web-based shiny app that is free for educational institutions.
Our course focuses on helping students make sense of numbers (i.e., statistical literacy). We believe that literacy means both reading and writing, but we did not want to teach students R programming. Instead, we use Rtutor.AI to facilitate students’ interaction with data.
Students are given little to no direct procedural instruction in Rtutor.AI outside of the assignment instructions, but are able to successfully complete the activities and connect them to the concepts discussed in class.
We share preliminary results from task-based interviews exploring the efficacy of the activities to develop their statistical thinking, as well as survey results related to students’ use of Rtutor.AI to conduct their own data analyses, and the impact that has on their learning, their interest in statistics, and their attitudes towards data and statistics.