Author Archives: Erin Blankenship

About Erin Blankenship

Erin Blankenship is a professor of statistics at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and coordinates the TA training program there.

There’s no convincing necessary if you’re the boss: implementing the simulation-based approach with TA instructors

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Erin BlankenshipErin Blankenship, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Like many statistics faculty who completed their graduate training during the last century, my preparation for teaching went something like this: I was handed a book (Moore & McCabe, 2nd edition—it’s still on my shelf). While TA training–at least at my institution–has evolved since then, it had to adapt further to prepare TAs for the simulation-based inference approach.[pullquote]… [TAs] also attended the large class meetings and so could see how I was implementing the simulation methods.[/pullquote]

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Finding the Right Balance

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Erin BlankenshipErin Blankenship, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

For me, the hardest part about getting started was finding the right balance in my classroom – the right balance between lecture and activities; the right balance between in-class and out-of-class learning; the right balance between student accountability and student responsibility. None of this, however, really had much at all to do with the randomization-based curriculum. I had taught courses for pre-service and in-service K-12 teachers that focused on simulation-based methods . . . I knew it was effective pedagogically. The hard part came when a colleague and I decided that we would try to flip our classrooms the same semester we implemented the randomization-based curriculum. And, that too in a classroom with 2-3 times as many students as a “typical” intro class in our department. [pullquote]… the right balance between lecture and activities; the right balance between in-class and out-of-class learning; the right balance between student accountability and student responsibility.[/pullquote]

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