Discussion: Leading Horses to Water

I am in full agreement with Moore's general thrust; indeed, I have been a minor participant in the movement to reform the teaching of statistics, having served as a member of the ASA/MAA Joint Committee that developed the recommendations shown in Moore's Figure 2 and as an instructor for workshops originated by that committee. For years I have expressed my teaching philosophy in such catch phrases as "statistics is not spectator sport" and "passive learning is an oxymoron" and have implemented that philosophy in the classroom by employing many of the variety of activities that Moore mentions and keeping the content of the course on a practical-rather than a mathematical level. Indeed, such a level is mandatory, for I teach the required introductory statistics course in the sociology department and sociology is a major that is often selected by students who prefer to have as little contact with mathematics as possible. Although, as a sociologist, I believe that some of the things we take as "facts"-for example, race-are socially constructed, I agree with Moore that there are hard and fast facts of mathematics. In that sense I am neither a radical constructivist nor even a social constructivist. But we must remember that statistics is not mathematics, and when Moore requires that his students in their problem solutions "state a conclusion in the context from which the data come" (as I do, too) we are (quite properly, I believe) bringing in opinion, subjectivity, and social construction. Indeed, one of the goals of teaching statistics according to the recommendations of the ASA/MAA Joint Committee on the Curriculum is to teach students that there is rarely a single "right" answer to a statistical problem. I have been teaching this course for some 30 years, through the student rebellions of the 1960's, through the movement from slide rules to mechanical calculators, to electronic calculators, to batch programming, to DOS-based PC programs, to menu-driven present-day statistical software. Starting out in the classroom, like so many college and university teachers, without any training in pedagogy, I have learned by doing. By trial and error and at enormous cost to generations of students, I have learned to teach. I even teach our department's teaching practicum on a regular basis. (In the practicum I regularly echo Moore's point that it is a snare and a delusion to teach in the way that "worked for us," because faculty-and the graduate students in the teaching practicum-are a self-selected bunch and not at all representative of the learning styles of undergraduates in general.) I present my credentials in this rather long-winded and certainly immodest way in order to make a point. Recently something has gone very badly wrong with my teaching and/or with my students' learning. As I write this I am slowly recovering from what I call "the semester from hell". Let me make clear what I was doing. I was, as usual, teaching introductory statistics, a required course for sociology majors. I was using David Moore's fine book The Basic Practice of Statistics (1995) and the companion workbook for Mintab, the statistical package that is implemented in our statistical laboratory. The class met twice a week for an hour in the lab and then for an hour and twenty