University of New Mexico (UNM)

Above: Dean Mark Peceny. His financial support made it possible for Statistical Literacy to be approved for General Education at UNM.

Dr. Erik Erhardt led the departmental effort to offer a consumer-based statistical literacy course along-side the traditional producer-based statistical inference course.

Dr. Milo Schield was hired as a consultant to inaugurate statistical literacy as a new course in the General Education curriculum.
He was also hired as the course coordinator to implement his course, to train the teachers and to teach a section of the course.

Dr. Fletcher Christiansen was a member of the statistical literacy committee and is the official 2022-23 UNM Statistical Literacy Coordinator.

2021: Letter to the Chronicle of Higher Education

Textbook: Statistical Literacy: Seeing the Story behind the Statistics.  Table of contents, glossary and index (2021B).

2022 Fall:

• ISLP Newsletter Article (International Statistical Literacy Project)
• Proposed mathematics requirement for undergraduates in Communications and Journalism.

Math 1300  STATISTICAL LITERACY

2021-22 Spring:  Syllabus:  Online

2022 Fall:  Syllabus:  Online

2021 Fall:

• Advising:  Fall 2021  Fall 2021  Spring 2020-21:  Arts and Sciences)  Business Administration
• Student Comments:  2022 Fall S1  S2: Describe Advise S2  S9:  2022 Spring  S1  S2  S9
• Syllabus: Fall Syllabus F2F

2021/11/19:  Teaching Statistical Literacy at a Community College

• Presentation at Central New Mexico Community College (CNMCC)  Slides

2022: NNN Opening: Schield, Dean Peceny, Erhardt, Giebitz, DiDomenico, Kowalczyk and Christiansen

2022: Statistical Literacy UNM Math 1300: First Year Results  Schield ASA JSM Slides

2021: Statistical Literacy Approved for General Education at UNM  Schield ASA JSM

2017: Dr. Erhard's Statistical Literacy slides.

FORMS SUBMITTED

UNM Committee/Registrar Forms:

New Mexico Higher Education Department (NM HED)

New Mexico Higher Education: General Education

UNM

TECHNICAL INSTRUCTIONS

UNM: Number Enrolled (slides)  Accessing class lists  (slides)

Canvas: Creating Writing Challenges.  (slides)  Writing Forum Rubric V1

Canvas: Student Response.  (slides)

Canvas: Create Survey.  (slides)

Canvas: Embedding videos using Kaltura.  (slides)

Canvas: Importing Videos into Canvas.  (slides)

Canvas: Writing Peer Reviews.  (slides)

Canvas: Grading 1-Line Writing.  (slides)

Canvas: Grading Peer Reviews.  (slides)

Canvas: Create Quiz from Quiz Bank.  (slides)

Canvas: Download Survey Data.  (slides)

Canvas: Copy between Courses.  (slides)

Canvas: Grades: Late Zeroes.  (slides)

Canvas: Import External Course.  (slides)

Canvas: Surveys: Copy to Excel.  (slides)

Canvas: Importing Grades from Odyssey.  (slides).

STATISTICAL LITERACY TEXTBOOK:

Schield's Statistical Literacy textbook is being used as the textbook for Math1300 at the University of New Mexico. This text was developed as a key part of the W. M. Keck Statistical Literacy Project.

In 2005, Capella University began offering Statistical Literacy on-line using this textbook. Dr. Valerie Perkins, Dean of Capella's School of Under-graduate Studies, notes, “Schield's approach to statistical literacy helps Capella students think critically while satisfying Capella's general education requirement in mathematical and logical reasoning.”

Peter Holmes, Royal Statistical Society Centre for Statistical Education, said, “I am convinced that the standard first course in statistics, which focuses on getting to significance testing and confidence intervals, isn't an appropriate aim for a lot of students. I think Milo's approach to statistical literacy is much closer to what is needed by journalists, by policymakers, by those in business commerce or management and by most people in everyday life.”

Statistical Literacy is closely related to numeracy, quantitative reasoning, quantitative literacy and statistical thinking/reasoning. They all focus on concepts or techniques involving numbers in context — typically numbers presented in the daily news.

But there are differences.

• Quantitative reasoning typically focuses on math topics such as rates and rates of change, percent of, graphs of change (first and second derivatives), linear and exponential rates of growth, accumulation (integral), installment loans, savings and weighted averages, indexes and condensed measures, estimation, plane geometry, graphical production and representation and probability (single and conditional).
• Quantitative literacy focuses much more on consumer-related topics such as reading and interpreting ratios, rates and percentages as encountered in statements, tables and graphs.
• Statistical thinking/reasoning (producer statistical literacy) typically focuses on statistics involving distributions and variation — specifically random variation such as that encountered in random selection or random assignment.

All three are typically quiet on causation, confounding and study design.

Statistical Literacy (consumer-based) is quite different. Statistical Literacy studies statistics used as evidence in everyday arguments. As such this text may be closer to critical thinking or rhetoric than to mathematics or statistics. This text uses the admonition, “Take CARE!” as a reminder that statistics are human constructs. Statistical literacy studies those factors that influence the size and direction of a statistic. Each of the four letters in CARE stand for a kind of influence on the size of a statistic: Context (comparisons, ratios, study design and confounding), Assembly (how statistics are defined and presented), Randomness (chance, margin of error and statistical significance) and Error or bias. The bulk of the book is spent on the first two types of influence.

The goal of the text is to help readers evaluate the strengths and weaknesses in statistics that are used as evidence in everyday arguments. These statistics include government-generated statistics: country-wide statistics (c.f., US Statistical Abstract), education statistics (c.f., National Assessment of Educational Progress) and health statistics (c.f., Center for Disease Control).

This text is quite different. Instead of algebra, it uses ordinary English to describe and compare counts, measures and conditional probabilities. It focuses on reading and interpreting statistics presented in tables and graphs. It presents a simple technique to show how a factor is “taken in account” or “controlled for.” It requires “hypothetical thinking” for students to imagine how things might have been defined, measured, compared or presented differently. It requires hypothetical thinking for students to imagine plausible confounders for observed associations.

2016: Augsburg Student Evaluations of STAT 102  by Schield ASA/JSM.  Course Comparison: STAT102 vs STAT 101

Schield's “Statistical Literacy 202”

0-2021 (very different from prior editions)

• Fifth edition is almost the same as fourth edition with error corrections and better handling of longitudinal studies.
• Outcomes using Take CARE methodology (34 KB)
• Detailed Tables of Contents for all Chapters: (120 KB)

CONTENTS  For chapter overview, download both audio and 6up overview. Play audio while watching the overview.

Contents: 321 pages, 5,620 paragraphs, 99,412 words.  510,254 characters. 
16 equations, 26 stories, 103 tables, 163 figures. Glossary 161 terms.

BOOK BACKGROUND:

This book was based on research findings of the W. M. Keck Statistical Literacy Project.

For an overview, see Isaacson's “Statistical Literacy — Online at Capella University.”

For an overview of the conceptual design, see Schield's “Statistical Literacy and Liberal Education at Augsburg College.”

For a briefing on the “Take CARE” methodology, see “Take CARE”

For a review of the technical aspects, see Schield's Statistical Literacy Curriculum Design.

For a review of difficulties in reading tables and graphs, see Schield's “Statistical Literacy Survey: Reading Tables and Graphs.” For papers on teaching confounding using the new graphical technique, see:

• Presenting Confounding Graphically Using Standardization, 2006 Stats magazine
• Confound Those Speculative Statistics 2009 ASA

For papers on teaching the social construction of statistics, see:

• Teaching the Social Construction of Statistics   2007 Midwest Sociological Society
• The Social Construction of Rankings 2010 ASA

Order Status:

The 2022B edition is being distributed by the bookstore at the Univ. of New Mexico (Albuquerque).  This edition goes with the more than 1,000 Moodle exercises that are available to teachers that use this book.

Statistical Literacy at Augsburg College: GST 200

• Ad: Statistical Literacy Course Online at AugsburgCollege.  Milo Schield, Instructor  Syllabus: 2010, 2015, 2016
• GST 200 is approved by Augsburg College: both a little Q (QL foundations) AND a big-Q (QL applications) course (6/2008)
• 2008StatLit2A Brochure: Course Overview. 2008
• Brochure that highlights the critical thinking aspects of the course including the focus on hypothetical thinking.  2007
• Application for a “Big Q” qualification at Augsburg College.  2007
• Statistical Literacy: Purpose and Definition.  Tom Burnham May 2003.

Over a Hundred Topics (Over a Thousand Problems):

As Lynn Steen noted, “concept” QL courses tend to be light on exercises. Over 130 homework topics involving right-wrong exercises have been identified for this book. More than a hundred of these topics have been implemented in Moodle as multiple choice quizzes with over a thousand problems. Having right-wrong exercises online gives students immediate feedback, eliminates the need for instructor grading, minimizes the class time needed to review these topics, and allows the instructor to see which kinds of exercises are giving the students the most difficulty. Here is a current list of the class-room tested, Moodle-based, right-wrong exercises.

Web-based Part-Whole Drill Programs:

Videos describing:

1. the part-whole reading program,
2. the part-whole writing program.

The part-whole reading drill program has 186 problems. 131 descriptions, 43 common-part comparisons and 12 distinct part comparisons.

The writing drill program currently has 301 problems: 6 chance-related, 266 tables, 14 bar graphs and 15 pie charts.

The most recent upgrade was to add chance/probability grammar to both programs.

Odysseys2Sense: a game of lively discourse

Odysseys (a unique web forum) is used to facilitate critical thinking. See this under Statistical Literacy tools.  Fall 2012 Challenges

Student survey:  Spring 2013  Fall 2013.  Advice to reviewers:  References  Huemer

Learn/Blackboard:

• UNM:Accessing Class List (slides). 2021

UNM Internal Documents

• UNM Sole-Source Request Statistical Literacy Consultant. 2018