Abstract:

In recent years, the importance of Statistics in the university has increased significantly, especially in those university degrees in which the treatment and analysis of data is vital to facilitate decision-making in processes of a very diverse nature. This is particularly true for university degrees related to Data Science, Artificial Intelligence, Business, Computing and Engineering. For the university teachers involved, teaching of the different subjects within this field presents an important challenge, mainly for the following two reasons. On the one hand, some students consider many statistical concepts abstract and difficult to understand, especially in the field of statistical inference. On the other hand, the rapid advancement of technology requires that students not only understand the main principles of Statistics, but also to be proficient in the use of advanced statistical tools and software.

In this context, a team of professors from the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV) has taken on the challenge of integrating emerging technologies into the university teaching of the subjects that comprise the Statistics curriculum within the Data Science Degree program (GCD) offered by UPV. This innovation proposal has required certain modifications in the teaching of the subjects, particularly the design of new formative activities for our students.

The objectives pursued in our innovation proposal are as follows: to increase students' motivation and engagement in the learning process; to improve their critical thinking skills; to familiarize them with and utilize advanced technologies as general support in data analysis; and to enable them to analyze their own learning process.

We have designed various in-person activities for the students, both individual and group-based. Most of the proposed activities are group-based, aimed at encouraging potential discussion among students' opinions and, consequently, the need to reach an agreement. This set of activities represents a significant innovation in the subjects of this field, both at the methodological level and in content restructuring, and is based on the daily use of statistical software and generative artificial intelligence (GAI) tools, such as Copilot, ChatGPT, or Gemini.

This paper provides a detailed description of the new activities proposed for one of the subjects in this GCD program and offers a critical assessment of the results obtained in those carried out during the 2023-2024 academic year. In this regard, one of the results detected has been the degree of unfamiliarity among most students with how to properly work with these novel GAI tools. Considering that we have worked with students from the GCD program, a relatively recent university degree with a scientific-technological orientation, this is quite a surprising result.

This result underscores the necessity of incorporating these types of artificial intelligence tools, which are here to stay, into the education of our students to ensure their correct and efficient use.

Keywords:

Generative AI, critical thinking, group-based activities, data science, undergraduate programs.