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GAISE-Aligned Pedagogy for Online Statistics Courses

Workshop 2: �Planning Opportunities for Student Discourse, Interaction, & Collaboration

Anelise Sabbag and Beth Chance (Cal Poly - San Luis Obispo)

Jennifer McNally and Laura Callis (Curry College)

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Are you ok with this timeline

Timeline: 60 minutes

5 min: what have you been doing?
5 min: introduction interaction in online course + GAISE
10 min: presenter 1
5 min for questions/conversation
10 min: presenter 2
5 min for questions/conversations
15 min: Engagement
5 min: wrap-up

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Agenda

We want to hear from you!

Interactions in Online Courses

Examples of interactions in online courses

Discussion Forums
Collaborative Keys

Questions
Breakout Room

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We want to hear from you! #1

What types of interactions between the INSTRUCTOR and STUDENTS do you value and want to see happen in your course?
How do you support/structure these interactions?

We will give you a few seconds to answer.

Post your answer in the chat when we say GO!

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We want to hear from you! #2

What types of interactions between STUDENTS do you value and want to see happen in your course?
How do you support/structure these interactions?

We will give you a few seconds to answer.

Post your answer in the chat when we say GO!

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We want to hear from you! #3

Do you think students value these interactions?
What are some of the challenges of establishing interactions in an online course?

We will give you a few seconds to answer.

Post your answer in the chat when we say GO!

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What do we want to see in online courses?

The same as what we see in face-to-face courses:

Active learning (see video from previous workshop on 11/1)
Interactions professor and students
Collaboration (students and students)
Role of assessments

Assessment OF learning
Assessment FOR learning

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Importance of Interactions

Opportunities for students to interact with each other and work collaboratively can help create a sense of community and facilitate the learning process (Everson & Garfield, 2008; Mills & Raju, 2011, Parker 2009, Karpiak 2011).

Encourage students to construct knowledge together as they interact with other students (and with the professor).

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Interactions: In Person

Traditional in-person

Small groups working together on a problem set in a classroom or computer lab under instructor supervision

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Interactions: In Person → Online

Traditional in-person

Small groups working together on a problem set in a classroom or computer lab under instructor supervision

Online teaching

Creating the key elements of activity learning found in a well-designed face-to-face environment

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Pedagogical Priorities (in GAISE)

To teach statistical thinking, focus on conceptual understanding, or foster active learning, peer-to-peer interactions are often an integral part of the educational experience. A small class necessarily means fewer peers to interact with, creating challenges for instructors.
Common themes for best practices include maximizing the strengths of each approach to foster interaction between students for discussions and collaborations regarding learning. For the partially synchronous environment, similar to the flipped classroom environment, instructors should carefully consider how to use the in-class time to maximize learning based on the goals of the course.

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Discussion Boards (GAISE)

Discussion boards can be used to have students describe how they would use statistics in their major. This can help students connect with other students in their major while they are learning more about applications of statistics in the real world. Critique of journalistic efforts to report scientific research can engender online conversation even asynchronously. The instructor can set up specific “question and answer” assignments where the students can use the discussion board to help each other better understand the material. Discussing the choice of analytical tool – by students for their coursework or by researchers whose reports are being critiqued – provides opportunity for statistical thinking, focusing on concepts, using technology, and multivariable thinking.

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Cooperative Learning (GAISE)

A cluster of teaching/learning techniques (with a variety of names and purposes) that involve students working together can provide opportunities for implementing GAISE recommendations into statistics courses. Team-based (St. Clair and Chihara 2012), student-driven (Sovak 2010), cooperative (Garfield 1993) or collaborative (Roseth, Garfield, and Ben-Zvi 2008) learning, and guided investigations (Bailey, Spence, and Sinn 2013) have nuances as outlined in the given references, but all come down to opportunities to foster active learning in the classroom and integrate real data with a context and a purpose, often necessitating the use of technology to analyze it. The actual tasks assigned to small groups of students might incorporate the remaining recommendations by focusing on statistical thinking and conceptual understanding.

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Structuring Opportunities for Discourse, Interaction, and Collaboration

Our experience:

Jen McNally & Laura Callis
Anelise Sabbag

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Discussion Boards (GAISE)

Discussion boards can be used to have students describe how they would use statistics in their major. This can help students connect with other students in their major while they are learning more about applications of statistics in the real world. Critique of journalistic efforts to report scientific research can engender online conversation even asynchronously. The instructor can set up specific “question and answer” assignments where the students can use the discussion board to help each other better understand the material. Discussing the choice of analytical tool – by students for their coursework or by researchers whose reports are being critiqued – provides opportunity for statistical thinking, focusing on concepts, using technology, and multivariable thinking.

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Perusall

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Discussion Boards

https://lor.instructure.com/resources/904132627c1447468c7df66229acbedb?shared�

Part of it is that they get points for commenting on each other's posts - 1 point for a comment that shows they've read the post and 2 points if the comment corrects or adds to the post. This increased the back and forth a bit because students were rewarded more highly for correcting each other's thinking. (What's really nice is you also don't have to repeat yourself a million times - you can just say, "see what I wrote on John's post." ) If they correct their mistake in the reply, I also give them credit for that, so that I'm grading the whole package, not just their first attempt. For example, some students chose 4 for the number of spins instead of 132 (the number of teachers) and other students corrected them. Another student thought about the problem only in terms of Black and White students, leaving out gender, and so used a null hypothesis of pi = 0.50 instead of 0.25 (but made the mistake of using the p^ of African American boys instead of African American children). This followed us working through the tasting water study and the dolphin study, so it was similar in structure. Techniques others have suggested is to allow students to see others’ posts only have they have made their own post. Another suggestion is to have a separate deadline for comments to be posted by, and then the instructor posts comments shortly after that - jumping in too early and you can shut down the conversation, jump in too late and students won’t look back at what you wrote.

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Discussion Board Rubrics

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Discussion Boards, another example

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Discussion Facilitator

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What questions do you have?

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Collaborative Keys

CKs are google docs that contain pre-populated questions developed and selected by the instructor.

CKs initially used with graduate students at the UMN (Le & Brearley, 2017; Brearley & Le, 2018)
Goal: students create the answer key to course activities as a class

Opportunity for multiple students to collaborate and share ideas in the document
Students can add answers and comments to the document as they work together to create an answer key (i.e. solutions) to the questions.
Me teaching online for the 1st time in 2018: “This sounds great! Let’s do it!”

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Schedule

Reading quiz
Activities
Collaborative Keys
Wrap-up Videos
Homework

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First Attempt on CKs

1 Collaborative Key per class
All questions from activity (30-35)
Format

1) 1st contribution
2) Professor’s feedback
3) 2nd contribution

Graded on completion
Interactions: STUDENT X PROFESSOR

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Schedule - Whole Class CK

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Schedule - Whole Class CK

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Schedule - Whole Class CK

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My Painful Experience

Things did NOT work as I expected. :(

Undergraduate students
Attitudes toward statistics
Effort & Interest & Expectations

Need to adapt to a different population!

*

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Adapting Collaborative Keys to my Audience

*

4-5 questions

3 students

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Cooperative Learning

Associated with higher self-esteem, achievement, sense of social support, and more (e.g. Johnson et al., 2000).
Five essential elements: (Johnson & Johnson, 2009)

Positive interdependence
Individual accountability
Promoting interaction
Appropriate use of social skills
Group processing

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Group Format of the CK

CKs now leverage research-based cooperative learning principles:

provide an initial answer

USE COLORS!!

discuss their answers
agree on a final group answer

*

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Clear Directions

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Deadlines

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Deadlines

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Deadlines

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Lack of Participation Report

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My Happy Experience!

Lots of student-to-student interactions!
Students helping each other
Statistical communication
Social interactions

*

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Lessons Learned

Grading!! Students pay attention to what you value!
Collaborative Key

Initial Answers

Individual points for submission (completion)

Discussion

Individual participation points for interactions (“correctness”)

Final Group Answer

Group points for correctness

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Lessons Learned

Grading!! Students pay attention to what you value!
Collaborative Key

Initial Answers

Individual points for submission (completion)

Discussion

Individual participation points for interactions (“correctness”)

Final Group Answer

Group points for correctness

Careful with instructor LOAD!

Grade only SOME questions in the CK?

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Lessons Learned

Wrap-up Videos

Did you watch it?
Did you pay attention to what you watched?

Graded on correctness

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Lessons Learned

Instructor presence

Group CK
we are not needed! :)
Whole class CK

instructor’s feedback is extremely important

I was still present in Wrap-up Videos

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Lessons Learned

Groups of 3 students
Same group throughout the quarter?! (for now)
Encourage students to get to know each other
Come up with a plan to work together

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Research on the way!

Sabbag, A., & Frame, S. (2021). Learning Design and Student Behavior in a Fully Online Course. Technology Innovations in Statistics Education, 13(1).
Sabbag, A. & Frame, S. (2022) Patterns of Interaction with Videos and Collaborative Assignments in An Asynchronous Online Statistics. Invited paper at the In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Teaching Statistics (ICOTS), September 2022, Rosario, Argentina.
Another article coming out soon on the Journal of Statistics and Data Science Education (JSDSE)