Teaching Statistics and Quantitative Methods

This work, which provides a guide for revising and expanding statistical and quantitative methods pedagogy, is useful for novice and seasoned instructors at both undergraduate and graduate levels, inspiring them to use transformative approaches to train students as future researchers.

Is it time for a radical revision in our pedagogical orientation? How are we currently teaching introductory statistics and quantitative methods, and how should we teach them? What innovations are used, what is in development? This ground-breaking edited volume addresses these questions and more, providing cutting-edge guidance from highly accomplished teachers. Many current textbooks and syllabi differ in only superficial ways from those used 50 years ago, yet the field of quantitative methods - and its relationship to the research enterprise - has expanded in many important ways. A philosophical axiom underlying this book is that introductory teaching should prepare students to potentially enter more advanced quantitative methods training, and ultimately to become accomplished researchers.

The reader is introduced to classroom innovation, and to both pragmatic and philosophical challenges to the status quo, motivating a broad revolution in how introductory statistics and quantitative methods are taught. Designed to update and renovate statistical pedagogy, this material will stimulate students, new instructors, and experienced teachers.

Joseph Lee Rodgers earned his Ph.D. in Quantitative Psychology, with a minor in Biostatistics, from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1981. He worked at the University of Oklahoma from 1981-2012, where he is George Lynn Cross Research Professor Emeritus. He joined the Quantitative Methods program at Vanderbilt in 2012. He has published two co-authored books, two edited books, and over 150 journal articles/book chapters in the professional literature. He has also had a career commitment to classroom teaching, and has written many articles in the statistics and quantitative methods literature that are didactic teaching-oriented articles.