INTERNATIONAL GROUP COMPETITION TO IMPROVE THE LEARNING PROCESS

Statistical education is of vital significance across the spectrum of educational levels and disciplines, and the education in statistics of future customers, users, producers, developers and researchers is important in an increasingly information-rich and information-hungry world, with escalating demand for evidence-based decision-making. But teaching statistics and data analysis to non-specialists usually face the challenge of relating course material to their real world and, also, of educating students to become intelligent consumers of statistics.
Many educators and researchers have developed and proposed different techniques for delivering teaching materials for the course of Business Statistics. In this study, we look more specifically into the effects of applying cooperation and competition students in three universities from Finland, Spain, and Turkey in a course of Business Statistics which is targeted to freshman bachelor students of the Business Administration Degree. The overall aim is to enhance students learning processes through a monitored project competition among students at international level. In the given common project, groups of students compete first at national level with their peers in their universities and then the national champions compete at international level. All group presentations are video recorded and jointly assessed by the three course teachers from the three universities, and the best ones are shared with all the students. The students are asked to answer a survey during the process for their insights about this creative method of teaching. The effects of cooperation and competition on learning outcomes are studied comparing them to the previous year ones, where there was no competition, and the results are shared in the paper.