Teaching statistics : Some important tensions

Thomas Kuhn’s structure of scientific revolutions (see Kuhn, 1962) identified an essential tension between normal science and paradigm shifts. On a far more modest level, this article identifies several important tensions that confront teachers of statistics, urges all of us who teach to welcome an opportunity to rethink what we do, and argues, more narrowly, for replacing the traditional year-long sequence in probability and mathematical statistics with a one-semester course in theory and applications of linear models. Some of the general areas addressed include goals for our students, attitudes toward abstraction, the role of geometric thinking, and attitudes toward mathematics as tool and as aesthetic structure. These are illustrated by comparing different approaches to the proof of the Gauss-Markov theorem and derivation of sampling distributions.

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