Another August, another JSM… This time we’re in Boston, in yet another huge and cold conference center. Even on the first (half) day the conference schedule was packed, and I found myself running between sessions to make the most of it all. This post is on the first session I caught, The statistical classroom: student projects utilizing student-generated data, where I listened to the first three talks before heading off to catch the tail end of another session (I’ll talk about that in another post).

Samuel Wilcock (Messiah College) talked about how while IRBs are not required for data collected by students for class projects, the discussion of ethics of data collection is still necessary. While IRBs are cumbersome, Wilcock suggests that as statistic teachers we ought to be aware of the process of real research and educating our students about the process. Next year he plans to have all of his students go through the IRB process and training, regardless of whether they choose to collect their own data or use existing data (mostly off the web). Wilcock mentioned that, over the years, he moved on from thinking that the IRB process is scary to thinking that it’s an important part of being a stats educator. I like this idea of discussing in the introductory statistics course issues surrounding data ethics and IRB (in a little more depth than I do now), though I’m not sure about requiring all 120 students in my intro course to go through the IRB process just yet. I hope to hear an update on this experiment next year from to see how it went.

Next, Shannon McClintock (Emory University) talked about a project inspired by being involved with the honor council of her university, when she realized that while the council keeps impeccable records of reported cases, they don’t have any information on cases that are not reported. So the idea of collecting student data on academic misconduct was born. A survey was designed, with input from the honor council, and Shannon’s students in her large (n > 200) introductory statistics course took the survey early on in the semester. The survey contains 46 questions which are used to generate 132 variables, providing ample opportunity for data cleaning, new variable creation (for example thinking about how to code “any” academic misconduct based on various questions that ask about whether a student has committed one type of misconduct or another), as well as thinking about discrepant responses. These are all important aspects of working with real data that students who are only exposed to clean textbook data may not get a chance practice. It’s my experience that students love working with data relevant to them (or, even better, about them), and data on personal or confidential information, so this dataset seem to hit both of those notes.

Using data from the survey, students were asked to analyze two academic outcomes: whether or not student has committed any form of academic misconduct and an outcome of own choosing, and presented their findings in n optional (some form of extra credit) research paper. One example that Shannon gave for the latter task was defining a “serious offender”: is it a student who commits a one time bad offense or a student who habitually commits (maybe nor so serious) misconduct? I especially like tasks like this where students first need to come up with their own question (informed by the data) and then use the same data to analyze it. As part of traditional hypothesis testing we always tell students that the hypotheses should not be driven by the data, but reminding them that research questions can indeed be driven by data is important.

As a parting comment Shannon mentioned that the administration at her school was concerned that students finding out about high percentages of academic offense (survey showed that about 60% of students committed a “major” academic offense) might make students think that it’s ok, or maybe even necessary, to commit academic misconduct to be more successful.

For those considering the feasibility of implementing a project like this, students reported spending on average 20 hours on the project over the course of a semester. This reminded me that I should really start collecting data on how much time my students spend on the two projects they work on in my course – it’s pretty useful information to share with future students as well as with colleagues.

The last talk I caught in this session was by Mary Gray and Emmanuel Addo (American University) on a project where students conducted an exit poll asking voters whether they encountered difficulty in voting, due to voter ID restrictions or for other reasons. They’re looking for expanding this project to states beyond Virginia, so if you’re interested in running a similar project at your school you can contact Emmanuel at addo@american.edu. They’re especially looking for participation from states with particularly strict voter ID laws, like Ohio. While it looks like lots of work (though the presenters assured us that it’s not), projects like these that can remind students that data and statistics can be powerful activism tools.