My article this week is “Do Hands-On Activities Increase Student Understanding?: A Case Study” and is found at http://www.amstat.org/publications/jse/v17n3/pfaff.html. This article concerns the effectiveness of using more hands-on activities for improving student understanding of statistical concepts.
A key concern with hands-on activities was the wide use of computer simulations. Although they provide an easy way to simulate statistical aspects, students sometimes have difficulty in relating the simulations to real life. Doing calculations quickly help in getting to an answer, but can lose the effectiveness of having students reflect upon what each calculation is doing along the way. Many students may even still be skeptical about the results. But through the use of other hands-on activities, students can think more deeply about what is going on, and be able to more readily relate the experience to the real world.
The authors developed four different hands-on activities to assist with four different concepts: the central tendency theorem, hypothesis testing and p-values, confidence intervals, and the role of variability. The authors conducted evaluations at the beginning and end of the course, along with three other assessments throughout the grading period. The authors found that many of the students thought the models were the most interesting think done in the class. Unfortunately, they could not find any significant increase in student understanding of the concepts than other methods.
Although I found the idea of testing ways to use more hands-on type of activities, I had several concerns with this particular study. Not so much from the curriculum, as with the way the teaching was being approached. It appeared that the activities were designed with more focus on demonstrating a concept rather than first thinking through what type would help the students understand this material better. The study does not really go into depth about student preparation beforehand or the level of discussion afterwards. It also was not clear why these particular concepts were the ones chosen for hands-on activities, and perhaps they were not the most conducive concepts for this type of approach. It does help reinforce the idea though that hands-on experiences, case studies, lecture, computer simulations, etc., are only tools we use. How well those tools are used, and whether the right tools are being used for the task, is probably the more critical point.