Approaches to Broadening the Statistics Curricula

In spite of major changes in science and technology and their enormous impact on statistical theory and practice, the statistics curricula have hardly changed. Traditional statistics courses give inadequate focus to computing and essentially ignore the vital topic of “statistical thinking and experience”. The authors offer 3 separate approaches to reduce the hurdles of changing the curricula by pooling resources from statistics communities. One approach provides resources for instructors to introduce computing into the curricula in innovative ways. The other involves infrastructure for transferring research results from the research community to the teaching community to provide guided statistical experiences for students. Also described is a new approach the authors have experimented with for teaching statistical thinking.