Learning From the Scientist's Lab Book: Designing Interactive Dynamic Documents for Teaching Statistical Thinking and Practice

University Of California-Berkeley, Berkeley CA

Investigators

Abstract

This project is providing a way for statistics researchers involved in data-driven scientific inquiry to share their methods with the statistics education community via an electronic lab notebook. This multi-dimensional, multi-resolution structured document captures the ideas, activities, computations, and most importantly, the thought processes underlying the statistician's analysis, creating, in effect, a comprehensive case study that reflects the entire data analytic process. A key component of the project is the integration of the R programming environment within a Web browser, resulting in an interactive instructional interface through which students can i) explore alternative approaches to an analysis that a researcher considered, ii) perform what-if scenarios, and iii) learn from tutorials that the instructor embeds in the notebook. Through a collaborative network of educators and researchers the project is building a library of full-length, modern, high-quality scientific analyses. The intellectual merit of the project lies not only in the technical step of integrating the R programming environment into the Web's infrastructure, but also in incorporating current research projects that are the subject of investigation in the NSF-funded "Explorations in Statistics Research" program for undergraduates. Representing academia, research institutes, and industry, researchers participating in this program are studying a variety of cutting-edge topics including global climate models; geo-location via wireless signals in a building; patterns in California highway traffic; 100-year flood events in Colorado; pollution; and mortality. The project is exercising broader impacts by transforming the statistics curriculum to foster the use of statistical thinking to solve important scientific problems and to embrace the practice of data analysis and its role in promoting learning through science inquiry. The project's technological innovation also supports a model of cooperation between research-active statisticians and the community of statistics educators. Finally, the electronic lab notebooks are readily incorporated into a variety of courses, including statistical methods and capstone courses.