Using games to improve students’ engagement and understanding of statistics in higher education

Publication type

Journal Article

Author

Publication date

March 18, 2024

Summary:

In this article we present a series of light-touch, easy to implement, classroom activities designed to improve students’ understanding and interpretation of regression coefficients. Using an experiment, we evaluate the effectiveness of the activities by randomly allocating first-year undergraduate students into a seminar with the activities (treatment group) or not (control group). We demonstrate that the classroom activities have a large, positive effect on several domains including engagement (measured by seminar attendance), enjoyment of learning (measured by an end-of-term student satisfaction survey), and their understanding of the material (measured by test scores). These results suggest that adopting more varied pedagogical approaches to teaching statistics/econometrics can benefit students.

Published in

Journal for Economic Educators

Volume and page numbers

Volume: 24 , p.44 -62

ISSN

26885956

Subjects

Link

https://libjournals.mtsu.edu/index.php/jfee/article/view/2475

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