STUDENT PROJECTS ON STATISTICAL LITERACY AND THE MEDIA

An important theme in an introductory statistics course is the connect ion between statistics and the outside world. This article describes s ome assignments that have been useful in getting students to learn how to gather and process information presented in the newspaper articles and scientific reports they read. We discuss two related assignments. For the first kind of assignment, students work through prepared inst ructional packets. Each packet contains a newspaper article that repor ts on a scientific study or statistical analysis, the original report on which the article was based, a worksheet with guidelines for summar izing the reported study, and a series of questions. In the second kin d of assignment, each student is required to find a newspaper article themselves, track down the original report, summarize the study using our guidelines, and write a critique of the article. Here, we describe the guidelines we developed to help the student in reading the newspa per article and original source, and the procedures we used for each t ype of assignment. Examples of handouts and assignments appear as appe ndixes.