Strength in Numbers: A Multidisciplinary, Project-based Course in Introductory Statistics

This paper describes a multi-disciplinary, project-based course. The course is aimed at providing greater curricular access to applied statistics for students across both divisional and departmental boundaries and includes lecture and laboratory components as well as intensive individualized instructor and peer support. Learning materials and teaching strategies were designed to be structured enough to allow students to consistently move forward with their research projects, yet broad enough to encourage them to creatively and independently explore their questions by actively driving the decisions involved in inquiry. In this way, the support each student receives is dictated by their own research question and the results at each stage of their project. We describe the course around the six recommendations of the ASA-endorsed Guidelines for Assessment and Instruction in Statistics Education (GAISE) which foster opportunities for project-based work through an emphasis on the use of real world data, active learning, conceptual understanding ra-ther than memorization, and the use of technology