Hi All,

I am starting a new thread here on the topic of stats texts for undergrads to follow the great discussion about combined design and stats books that Paul kicked off. We teach a sophomore level statistics class here and have not yet added a dedicated design course for all of our students (the honors students get their own design class in the context of their thesis work).

I have had some success with an undergraduate intro stats class which closely follows Danny Kaplan's very cool and unorthodox book ( http://www.macalester.edu/~kaplan/ism/ ). We use RStudio Server (so the students do not run R on their own laptops nor do they ever download files but rather use constructions like load(url("http://thedata.rda")) ).   And I never lecture, but instead make each class into 55 minutes of intensive hands-on work where the TA and I wander the room helping the students grapple with the in-class handouts. We do not use a GUI but expect the students to learn R as they read the book and complete the in-class assignments. I add my own module on the central limit theorem and skip his vector geometric coverage of orthogonal projection and logistic regression. The keys to this course being popular are (1) the book, (2) no lectures, and (3) no local installs of R (thanks to RStudio Server and the RStudio crew).

We are a strong engineering and computer science school, so, we do have some students who have had some past programming skills, but we also have the expected mix of quantitative inclinations for a political science department in a large state school.

If anyone else has had good luck (or useful warnings) about their past experience teaching undergraduate political science majors about statistics, I'd love to hear it.

Best,

Jake





Jake Bowers
Assistant Professor, Dept of Political Science
Assistant Professor, Dept of Statistics
Research Scientist, National Center for Supercomputer Applications
University of Illinois @ Urbana-Champaign
http://jakebowers.org





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