An Investigation Designed to Teach Statistical Thinking in the Midst of the COVID-19 Pandemic: Are Teens Living Like Vampires?

Abstract

Students can learn to think statistically by being actively engaged in investigations that use real data to answer a question. Projects that explore familiar questions that students intuitively understand can spark their interest and are ideal vehicles to teach data literacy. This article shares a project that was used in an introductory statistics course to investigate if young people were sleep-deprived or had altered their sleep schedules during the COVID-19 pandemic. Students’ interest was piqued and they were highly motivated to learn how the pandemic had impacted their peers. Working with an authentic, relatable context, helped students make conjectures. I describe how students used descriptive and inferential statistics to understand whether their peers’ sleep schedules had changed during the pandemic. Pedagogical practices that are shared helped build students’ confidence and decrease the sense of overwhelm that can accompany comprehensive investigative projects. In addition to the significant gains students made, modeling how statistics research is done outside the classroom, investigative projects such as this can provide teachers with valuable insights and an alternative way to assess students’ ability to think like empirical researchers.

Keywords

• Active learning
• Community college
• Data investigation
• Statistical literacy
• Statistics course project