Background

Beginning in Spring 2014, several faculty members in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Memphis became interested in redesigning the Elementary Statistics course at U of M following the Guidelines for Assessment and Instruction in Statistics Education (GAISE) College Report's recommendations (Aliaga et al., 2005). Their specific recommendations for introductory statistics classes emphasize conceptual understanding, active learning, and the use of real-world data from current studies to help students learn to solve problems in the field. These guidelines were recently updated (Carver et al., 2016) with the additional recommendations, among others, of teaching statistical thinking and teaching statistics as an investigative, problem solving, decision making process. The SELES Math 1530 classroom model supports these recommendations.