Statistical project work is the key for job readiness

Ayse Aysin Bilgin (Macquarie University)

Tuesday 17th September 12:00-13:00 Maths 311B

Abstract

Higher education is changing with soft skills being implemented into the curriculum to prepare students for life after university. A statistics project is an essential component in ensuring that students have mastered communicating statistical findings in a non-technical manner suitable for a general audience. Students can be taught soft skills, such as communication, with carefully planned learning activities and project assessments.

I implemented project assessment in an undergraduate work integrated learning course with structured learning activities and mentoring where students worked on real client projects with messy data and ill-defined research questions. Being able to prepare a data set for analysis, analysing data and communicating results are essential skills, for putting their knowledge into use and for finding employment as a statistician.

I argue that in statistics, the ideal way to help students transition from learning to job ready graduates is to use project work assessments in such a way that students are provided with feedback at each step of their work to enable them to improve what they are doing and to become better communicators of their findings. In a sense, it is similar to an apprenticeship where novices begin their journey on becoming experts under the mentorship of their lecturers. Although students found the experience daunting at times, they valued the experience gained, increased their confidence on their knowledge and improved their communication skills. Interestingly, some students were sceptical about learning communication skills in a statistics unit at the beginning of a semester, however, towards the end of the unit many begin to realise the importance of being able to communicate effectively in words because numbers do not speak to strangers, context needs to be understood/explained through a coherent piece of written work. 

There are many publications on project-based learning in statistics education literature, however learning activities to promote communication of statistics and improving students’ communication skills are not specifically explained. In this presentation, I aim to provide a structure for designing learning activities for improving students’ communication skills in statistics which could be useful for adoption or adaption by academics planning to implement project-based assessments.

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