National Statistics Teaching Practice Survey: Planning and on-line logistics

Assessment/Research (91)

This project is one component of a collaborative effort to develop and pilot the National Statistics Teaching Practice Survey (NSTPS), which is based on the Statistics Teaching Inventory, designed as part of the completed NSF-funded ARTIST project (DUE- 0206571). This component is creating the mechanism for administering the survey online, creating a database and reporting structure, and make preparations for the national administration of the instrument to a representative group of teachers. A sister project (National Statistics Teaching Practice Survey: Instrument development) based at the University of Minnesota is developing, evaluating, and refining the survey instrument and working with researchers from other STEM disciplines to align this project with similar efforts in other fields. That instrument is to be used to gather and examine some pilot data over multiple time points, including settings where change is anticipated (e.g. in gauging instructional changes for participants in a best practices workshop). Together these two projects are preparing the way for follow on work to gather longitudinal data on the teaching of STEM undergraduate courses in order to track changes over time and measure the alignment of teaching with data-based recommendations for improvement in teaching methods and materials.

These two connected projects are creating and implementing online a new research tool to gather important data on the teaching of statistics courses. The instrument can then be used to study the relationship of teaching practices with student learning, the alignment of teaching practice with recognized best practice guidelines, national changes in teaching practice over time, and changing teaching practices following professional development workshops. This pilot project has the potential to serve as a starting point and model for similar instruments and data collection in other STEM disciplines.