Cactus: Computer-Assisted Curriculum for Teaching Undergraduate Statistics

Charles E. Denk and Douglas E. Loyd, Sociology

1995 TTI Fellow

Project website: http://www.people.virginia.edu/~del6n/cactus.html

Mr. Denk and Mr. Loyd have created a program that just might have achieved the impossible: making learning statistics fun. The Computer Assisted Curriculum for Teaching Undergraduate Statistics (CACTUS) is created to serve as a self-teaching approach to statistics education. Designed for undergraduate social science majors, it is an electronic workbook that can be used as a lab supplement, and allows students with varying skills and backgrounds to proceed at their own pace through the core areas of the statistics curriculum.Statistics is a course required by most social science departments, and the students come to this introductory course from highly diverse backgrounds. This project was born of a desire to counter the dilemma common to most statistics instructors of spending most available class time instructing students on how to run statistical software. Students spend almost all their time grappling with the statistical software, and not enough time learning the essential concepts or techniques of analysis and interpretation. Mr. Denk's answer to this dilemma was to design a computer-assisted "workbook" which supplements the traditional curriculum of lectures and labs and which focuses on putting the essential tools of statistics education-graphical analysis and computational experimentation-to work teaching the concepts and ideas essential to an understanding of statistics.His "system" has an array of features to fill various statistical teaching needs: basic tutorials, intuitive data analysis tools, advanced material, interactive exercises, all emphasizing conceptual and interpretive competence. The Windows-based environment is intuitive, easy-to-learn, and rich with graphical features. The lessons are modular, so that the instructor-or the student-can determine the order or degree of coverage of the topics. Furthermore, instructors have the opportunity to customize the lessons, modifying them to individual specifications. ANSI data and text interfaces allow instructors to use their own favorite Windows-based word processors and statistical packages to prepare data sets and exercises; they can then insert them into the lessons with the ease of a simple upload.