Currently, I have children in college, and I often see them quite upset and disappointed, for a repetitive cause: they are not making progress with the statistics task. They have managed to navigate through the maze of the university quite successfully, until they stumble upon anything that resembles math. They may even be proficient in their math, but I couldn’t tell what’s wrong with their stats as they aren’t getting it. They put their hearts in, but even, they continue to fight, without seeing a small glimmer of hope, which could really be a deterrent. How do statistics create this situation for my otherwise successful college students?
I am fully convinced that the reason is due to an incorrect strategy to teach statistics. I am an educator and, I can assure you, with the concern of being wrong, I absolutely recognize the cause of the problem, and it really amazes me that no one really mentions it. It happens that children are not actually punished for the slaughter that we can see in any reputable statistics course. Because, let’s go to the bottom, many students face very basic needs, and it is enough for them to repeat formulas like a parrot. It’s really easy to go through a class like that, with almost no scars, but you can imagine what they really learn from it. And then there are those who have to confront some teachers who seem to believe that their students are somehow experts, and will assign an extraordinary amount of statistical homework. Young people sink later. Why? I still haven’t come up with the answer, have I? But in reality, students are not told the whole story. They are said to think that statistics is some kind of a large-scale course that starts with your own principles and everything you need to figure things out, but that’s not the truth. In order to successfully undergo a serious statistics course, you must first understand probability. Period. How were you supposed to understand the second part of a novel if you didn’t read the first part? It is the same with probability and statistics, where the latter is the logical and essential prolongation of the other. I have invariably marveled at why they do it. And then they complain that a large portion of students are trying to find statistics homework help online, because they can’t find it in their own class, because they are pressured to understand a story without knowing the beginning.
Is there a way to find the result of the problem? College planners make their plans in the ethereal world, dreaming of the ideal requirements for some specific degrees. They have some preconceptions in mind about how curricula should be designed, but many times they tend to fail miserably. They build their grand plans in the air and in their dreams they want to demand that students have these and those talents, but they do not seem to understand the essence of a process that leads to true proficiency. They want to train “experts” in statistics, but they want that experience to come from scratch. Undoubtedly the time for change has come, and it will be irreversible. We demand that things be reconsidered, at least when it comes to mathematics education.
