Using the Mississippi River Watershed Module in Introduction to Probability and Statistics - STAT 300

Joel Gimbel, Northern Illinois University

Course Description

Introduction to the basic ideas and fundamental laws of probability including sample spaces, events, independence, random variables, special probability distributions and elementary statistical inference.

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Relationship of the Mississippi River Watershed Module to Your Course

Stat 300 is a semester long introductory statistics course targeted primarily to STEM majors. The course is roughly split between descriptive statistics/probability foundations in the first half of the semester and inferential statistics (confidence intervals and hypothesis testing) in the second half. The course is for the most part theoretical; however, the Common Exercise allowed the students to focus on water pollution as a consistent thread for the last six weeks of the course. Additionally, students were asked to research specific data sources and to cite at least one source article during their small group presentations.

Integrating the Module into Your Course

I started the module, so Stat 300's a full semester course, and I started the module after the midterm break. We basically did it in half class period times slots, so we would continue our work going forward. We started the first part of the exercise, the module, we did more of a brainstorm. And then for the town hall, allowed the kids to work in class for a half a period and then took at least another period or two to let them get their presentation set up. And then did the town hall. That took a full period. And then we were kind running out of time almost at that point, so it was pretty near the end that we hooked into the mural application and built the concept map. So overall it covered several weeks to get through the whole course module, but while we were doing that, we were still working on stats going through there.

What Worked Well

I think that concept worked well for the town hall. The town hall did work for us. The usefulness of it, and really why I started to do the project was I was always looking for some specificity in what we were doing. So once we got through the town hall, we used that going forward and started working on problems with pollution. My hope was that the students would be able to find some real world data and that we could use that in our course specifics assignments. Turned out that was pretty hard, so I ended up scouring the net to get some stuff that was legitimate. But that allowed me to then farm that out to them so that they could use that. So the last couple homework assignments, they had to do some data crunching with some nitrogen pollution data that I got from the government. That started after the town hall because that's where that really came into play. We started being more specific on the actual content matter. So that worked well and then I had hoped, I probably should have started that a little earlier I think.

Challenges and How They Were Addressed

The biggest challenges for me was doing the concept mapping in groups. The course and me in particular, we don't work with groups too much, so it's primarily a lecture-based course. So when I started to do the brainstorming and the initial concept map draft, it was a little sluggish because they were just kind of working individually and there was not a lot of connections. I had planned to put them in groups for the town hall because it was easier. I had the stakeholders already mapped out and then I randomly selected and got them into groups. So once we got to the town hall, their groups were kind of set, but prior to that it was more of an individual thing and it was hard for them to get started. So that's why I think we turned that initial drafting into more of a brainstorm where we worked as a class, Nat. And once we got through the town hall, all the groups were set. So the town hall moved forward and there was more interaction. Some groups were better than others, but for the most part they were interacting.

And that's I allowed them some time during class to kind of get settled. There wasn't a lot of work that happened outside of class. That's another thing that would made it a little bit difficult. So even the prep work for that I found really kind of needed to be done in class. So it did take a decent amount of class time to set that up. And then once those groups are set, then getting them to work in the mural and put the concept map together, that worked pretty well. But again, the groups are kind of, I did that more of an individual thing and getting more of them to make an impact into that is something that I think I would need to work on if we did it again. It's like I had certain individuals come in and work in that mural. Everyone kind of got linked into it, but it was only a handful of students that were really kind of connecting with it.

Student Response to the Module and Activities

I'm not sure the concept mapping really, really made a huge impact for some of those reasons I talked about. I wasn't able to get full engagement in that, but I think the students did enjoy working on the stakeholder project part, the town hall project. I think that that allowed them to go and do the rest of the course with this idea of maybe I can do that with some specific type of data, so it focused. If I was doing this again, I would do that earlier, definitely do this earlier and not later. My idea was that they would have all these skills build up and then they could put this together to the town hall, but I needed more time. So I would've done it in the first half of the semester for sure and then use that thread to go forward. That worked. I think they enjoyed that, but the concept mapping part, it was like, where do we put the stats in here? It was more like we got some icons on some of these stat ideas and they got put into the concept map, but the connections were a little thin I think.