Abstract:

A lot of university students have a sense of fear instead of pleasure in courses about methods of quantitative social research, especially in statistics. One might say that sociologists and statistics don’t match. A majority of students is afraid of maths or wasn’t good at maths in school. Another aspect is that failing in courses often leads to a withdrawal from ones studies, concurrently it is a well-known fact that a raise of quality in teaching will lead to a reduction of study terminations.

This paper attempts to conceptualize practice-oriented lecture types so as to make statistics more vivid and increase the quality of teaching. It is in part a project of the new Center of Methods in Social Sciences in Frankfurt, Germany which aims to substantially improve method education. The main emphasis of this paper rests on developing a new concept for statistic courses with the aid of pedagogic concepts on the basis of mathematics- and e-learning didactics. An attempt is made to implement new teaching forms and develop further learning opportunities.

Statistics courses can often only be offered as a lecture with a high percentage of frontal teaching. Courses are complemented by new forms of teaching so as to improve the teaching quality and educational success. Important elements are e.g.: feedback methods. Further components are the development of new practice formats for the lecture session and teaching platform.

Evaluations and learning style inventories, specially developed for the courses, are used to assess teaching- and learning success, which integrate both students as well as the teacher. Thus, this paper wants to fill a gap by providing statistics teaching with a didactical and practice-oriented concept and thereby contributing to important changes in method teaching.

Keywords:

Teaching statistics, teaching methods, quality of teaching, pedagogic concepts, evaluations, learning style inventories.