Building Communication Skills in a Theoretical Statistics Course

TL;DR

This paper explores integrating communication skill development into a theoretical statistics course through projects involving statistical explanation, writing, and presentation, to enhance students' ability to articulate statistical concepts.

Contribution

It introduces two student projects combining computation, theory, and communication to improve verbal and written explanation skills in a theoretical statistics course.

Findings

Students improved their ability to explain statistical concepts.

The projects engaged students in practical applications and critique.

Enhanced communication skills complemented theoretical understanding.

Abstract

The traditional theoretical statistics course which develops the theoretical underpinnings of the discipline (usually following a probability course) is undergoing near-continuous revision in the statistics community. In particular, recent versions of this course have incorporated more and more computation. We take a look at a different aspect of the revision - building student communication skills in the course, in both written and verbal forms, to allow students to demonstrate their ability to explain statistical concepts. Two separate projects are discussed, both of which were engaged in by a class of size 17 in Spring 2015. The first project had a computational aspect (performed using R), a statistical theory component, and a writing component, and was based on the historical German tank problem. The second project involved a class presentation and written report summarizing, critiquing, and/or explaining an article selected from The American Statistician.