Abstract:

In a fast-changing global environment, students will need to prepare themselves for a future that will continue to bring several changes and will be challenging them in different ways such as in their professional life, daily life, and as citizens. According to Boyle et al. (2014)
“In recent years there have been criticisms that traditional methods of teaching (...) and statistics do not inspire a passion (...) in students and do not allow students to apply their knowledge. Consequently, teachers are continually looking for new ways to make (...) statistics more appealing to their students”.

The Statistical Methods course of the Informatics Engineering degree and the Probability and Statistics course of the Mechanics Engineering and Civil Engineering degrees were taught in a northeastern university in Portugal. Each of those courses had 2 hours per week of theoretical classes and 2 hours per week of laboratory practice classes during a 15 weeks semester. The three courses had around eighty students in the school year of 2017/2018 and in order to make the course more engaging for the students, we added new elements to the course activities – more student centered – and to its assessment – valuing the components of the student-centered tasks. In order to engage students with their “own” data, students had to work on a small project – a survey about mobile apps: they analyzed the data with statistical methods, presented a poster as a final product, and defended it orally. In every theoretical class, the students had to fill a Google Drive survey, individually or cooperatively, with questions that allowed them to review that class topics. The assessment was completed with two written tests. At the end of the semester, the students filled a survey with their opinions about the introduced changes.

This work has a qualitative and descriptive nature (Cohen, Manion & Morrison, 2011) and we aim to report the results of the final survey made to the students in order to understand their opinions about the changes made in the Statistical Methods course in the Informatics, Mechanics and Civil Engineering degrees in the school year of 2017/2018. According to the respondents (50% of the enrolled students), they enjoyed the changes and the new aspects of the course. Some of them even made suggestions to improve classes and increase their motivation. Students also referred that they enjoyed the Google Drive survey either as to make them pay attention to the theoretical classes or to complete their study the tests topics.

Keywords:

Statistics, technologies, own data, survey.