A NEW APPROACH TO TEACHING SAMPLING BASED ON COMPUTER ASSISTED METHODS

Bologna process of creating the European Higher Education Area has forced changes in teaching methodology. Students have to become learners and so their roles have to be transformed into active thinker better than passive listeners.

In this new educational environment, teachers have to turn into guides who lead relevant information, helping them to find and use it, in order to acquire the knowledge and the expected skills. Another important task associated to teachers is to encourage the student’s choices, i.e. students should know how to select among the different procedures and materials to solve a given problem. In other words, students should know by themselves how to analyze the advantages and drawbacks related to a problem. This task is the idea followed in this work.

The study of survey sampling clearly requires computational tools in practice. Most survey data used by statistical agencies and other institutions are obtained via specific sampling designs, which generally belong to the class of complex sampling designs. There exist a wide class of statistics software to treat with survey data, and most of them are not free.

A possible criterion to select the software to teaching survey sampling at the university could be the cost. However, the software that students will use in the future should be also taken into account. For this purpose, we applied for a teaching innovation project where the idea was that students could choice the software to learn about sampling in finite populations. We thus constructed a web page where students can consult different characteristics, such as cost, utility, etc, related to the software. We also provided to the student several practices solved with three different programs: PCCARP, SUDAAN and R. In this way, each student has to choice among the three programs and then he has to realize the practice with the help of the teacher. Finally, each student also has to solve a real problem with the selected program.

We think that this methodology allows to the students to have a more personal apprenticeship according to their preferences and skills. Also, it can encourage a more appropriate implication in the subject.