Papers and Peer Review In Advanced Statistics

 

Kelly Cline, Carroll College

 

In this series of assignments, given to a junior level calculus-based statistics class, we use writing, discussion, and peer review to teach good use of inferential statistics, the practice of clear mathematical writing, and to provide an introduction to the process of modern research.

 

        1.  Students must submit a proposal for an original term project, approximately one page in length.  This proposal must explain what question their study will answer, what population they will be sampling, how they will gather their sample, and the methods that they will use to analyze their data.  These papers are graded and suggestions may be offered about how to improve the project.

 

        2.  The students are given about half of the term to complete their project and write it up in a formal paper.  They each make a brief illustrated presentation to the class describing their work.

 

        3.  We break the class into groups of about 6 students and each group gives copies of all their papers to another group (i. e. each member of group A receives a copy of all six papers written by group B).  Now the students are given a few weeks to write a paper in which they analyze the strengths and weaknesses of each project and rank them (1-6) so that three are "accepted for publication" and three are "rejected."  Their paper must justify the acceptances/rejections, thus preventing students from blandly accepting every project, and forcing them to point out specific weaknesses or flaws in the rejected papers.

 

        4.  After assignment 3 has been collected, the students meet with their groups and discuss the papers that they all read, especially focusing on the differences in their rankings.  They must work as a committee and create a consensus committee ranking, then fill out a worksheet in which they justify their rankings and offer recommendations to each author as to how their paper could be improved.  Because assignment 3 forces the students to form and defend opinions about these papers, the resulting discussion can be very rich, with students probing into the quantitative and conceptual issues quite deeply.

 

        5.  Now that they have seriously analyzed the work done by their peers, in the final weeks of the term students are given the opportunity to submit a revision of their term paper along with a list explaining each change that they have made.  Their final score is then an average of both scores on their term paper.