Participant observation in statistics classes (Steve Fienberg interview)

CMU professor Steve Fienberg has a nice recent interview at Statistics Views.

He brings up great nuggets of stats history, including insights into the history and challenges of Big Data. I also want to read his recommended books, especially Fisher’s Design of Experiments and Raiffa & Schlaifer’sApplied Statistical Decision Theory. But my favorite part was about involving intro stats students in data collection:

One of the things I’ve been able to do is teach a freshman seminar every once in a while. In 1990, I did it as a class in a very ad hoc way and then again in 2000, and again in 2010, I taught small freshman seminars on the census. Those were the census years, so I would bring real data into the classroom which we would discuss. One of the nice things about working on those seminars is that, because I personally knew many of the Census Directors, I was able to bring many of them to class as my guests. It was great fun and it really changes how students think about what they do. In 1990, we signed all students up as census enumerators and they did a shelter and homeless night and had to come back and describe their experiences and share them. That doesn’t sound like it should belong in a stat class but I can take you around here at JSM and introduce you to people who were in those classes and they’ve become statisticians!

What a great teaching idea 🙂 It reminds me of discussions in an anthropology class I took, where we learned about participant observation and communities of practice. Instead of just standing in a lecture hall talking about statistics, we’d do well to expose students to real-life statistical work “in the field”—not just analysis, but data collection too. I still feel strongly that data collection/generation is the heart of statistics (while data analysis is just icing on the cake), and Steve’s seminar is a great way to hammer that home.