A Cooperative Teaching Approach to Introductory Statistics

Abstract

Many of today's university undergraduate curricula include two seemingly conflicting themes: (1) increase the quality of teaching to include emphasis on pedagogical elements, such as active learning, in the undergraduate statistics classroom; and (2) cope with a decrease in teaching resources. In this paper, a means by which a department of mathematics or statistics can maintain and increase its standards of teaching excellence in introductory statistics while coping with ever-increasing budgetary pressures is proposed. This process involves promoting what we call cooperative teaching, applying the concepts of cooperative learning to a group of instructors.