
Title
Implementing a Computerized Tutor in a Statistical Reasoning Course: Getting the Big Picture
Speakers
Oded Meyer, Department of Statistics and Marsha Lovett, Department of Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University
Abstract
Carnegie Mellon's introductory statistical reasoning course aims to teach the basic ideas of data analysis to a group of students with diverse backgrounds. There are several challenges inherent in teaching this course; foremost among them is the difficulty of converying a sense of the "big picture." Over the past several years, we have been working to design and implement a computerized learning tool that will help overcome this obstacle. This tool is a cognitive tutor in which students solve data-analysis problems and receive individually tailored feedback. In this talk, we will give an overview of the course and the challenges in teaching it, describe and demonstrate the cognitive tutor technology (i.e., how it has worked in other domains and how we have applied it in this course), and discuss our directions for future work.