Developing Students' Communication Skills in Statistics

Presentation Date: 

Sunday, May 28, 2023

At the Statistical Society of Canada annual meeting in Ottawa, I co-facilitated the statistical education workshop with five other colleagues.

Abstract:

It is critical to equip students with professional skills. In particular, they need to develop effective verbal and written communication skills and it is our responsibility to help them in the process. As statistics educators, we strive to include meaningful relevant course activities that provide our students with opportunities to develop reasoning skills and a deep understanding of concepts, we tend to face challenges teaching students how to appropriately verbalize and write about statistics. This workshop targets statistics educators who plan to support their students’ learning about how to communicate the results of a scientific investigation of data, such as how to describe data succinctly, create effective visualizations, and accurately summarize statistical findings. In this workshop, we facilitate activities drawn from best practices in statistics education, utilizing the work by Deborah Nolan and Sara Stoudt in Communicating with Data: The Art of Writing for Data Science (2021) as well as sharing our own practical ideas for supporting students’ development of their communications skills in statistics.