NSF Award
1611732
This project will fund a student statistical consulting group, called SCHOLAR (Statistical Consulting Help for Organizational Leaders and Academic Researchers). SCHOLAR will give students the opportunity to study statistics while participating in service learning or experiential education projects. It will be an academic year program, staffed by undergraduate students who will work collaboratively on interdisciplinary projects submitted by researchers at the University of Central Oklahoma (UCO) or organizations in the community. Up to 20 students will be directly involved with SCHOLAR each year and hundreds indirectly through high school recruiting visits and project dissemination. High school seniors and undergraduate students will be recruited from a variety of majors and will enter the program in their freshman or sophomore years. The goals of SCHOLAR are (1) to increase the number of undergraduate students majoring or minoring in statistics or mathematics, especially those from underrepresented groups in STEM (e.g. Native Americans and women) and first-generation low-income students; (2) to teach undergraduate students, through faculty and peer mentoring, how to conduct and report research, and to prepare students for careers or graduate study in STEM fields; (3) to contribute to the growing body of research concerning the effects of experiential statistics education on undergraduate students; and (4) to provide statistical consulting services to other faculty at UCO and the community at large.<br/><br/>SCHOLAR will significantly change the current methods of statistics instruction and research, especially with respect to the involvement of recent high school graduates and college underclassmen in experiential statistics education. It will also contribute to the renewed call for improvement in STEM education by providing undergraduate students access to real research and real data. SCHOLAR students will meet with clients as consultants, collect and analyze data, and provide written and oral summaries of their work. They will also be required to present each year at a local and/or national conference. Other SCHOLAR features include student mentoring by peers, faculty, and researchers; teaching opportunities through student-led seminars; and early exposure to a variety of research being conducted both on- and off-campus. The effects of SCHOLAR activities on students will be tracked and evaluated and the outcomes will be reported through publications and presentations at professional meetings. SCHOLAR will be a model program for the use of experiential education to teach statistics, especially at primarily undergraduate institutions. Future plans are to expand the SCHOLAR model to other institutions, and to branch out to incorporate other disciplines including mathematical biology, operations research, and high-performance computing.
