Black Lives Matter Support (Confidence Interval for Means)
DACA Registration Rates (Confidence Intervals and z-Scores)
Ethnic Representation at PCC vs PUSD (Distributions of Categorical Variables)
Food Insecurity and Stress (Normal Distributions and Empirical Rule)
Homelessness and Shelter Beds (Measures of Center)
Perceptions of Bias among LGBTQ Individuals (Intro to Hypothesis Testing)
Recidivism and Yoga (Probability)
STAT 18 Syllabus Rock
Vaccine Rates across Ethnic Groups (Hypothesis Testing for Sample Proportions)
Voting Rights (Sampling Distribution of Proportions)
STAT 18--Statistics for the Behavioral and Social Sciences: Open for Antiracism (OFAR)
Overview
The Open for Antiracism (OFAR) Program – co-led by CCCOER and College of the Canyons – emerged as a response to the growing awareness of structural racism in our educational systems and the realization that adoption of open educational resources (OER) and open pedagogy could be transformative at institutions seeking to improve. The program is designed to give participants a workshop experience where they can better understand anti-racist teaching and how the use of OER and open pedagogy can empower them to involve students in the co-creation of an anti-racist classroom. The capstone project involves developing an action plan for incorporating OER and open pedagogy into a course being taught in the spring semester. OFAR participants are invited to remix this template to design and share their projects and plans for moving this work forward.
Action Plan
In the development of materials for this course, my goal was to provide students with applications of the course concepts that felt relevant to their life experiences and helped them see how statistics was used in systems, institutions and processes that they engaged with every day. This goal is anti-racist insofar as many materials developed for Statistics are either entirely hypothetical (e.g., made up data related to hypothetical problems) or not relevant to most students' everyday lives (e.g., studying probability by looking at likelihood of different outcomes in casino games). By creating materials that deal with real world problems, including those disproportionately encountered by students of color (e.g., undocumented immigrant experiences, encounters with the justice/carceral system), I aimed to engage students more deeply with the material.
My secondary goal was to empower students to make change in the systems and institutions that were discussed. For instance, in one assignment, students examine the ethnic background of our local public school district, and compare this to the ethnic background of our college. In doing so, they discover that, although Black students are enrolled at higher-than-expected rates in California as a whole, Black students show lower-than-expected enrollment at our college. Rather than merely document this, though, I have students brainstorm explanations of why this might be, and how the college could do a better job of recruiting and retaining Black students. In adding this step, I empower students to engage in that advocacy work, now armed with the statistical analysis to back up their suggestions.
Course Description and Syllabus
STAT 18 is an introduction to the topic of statistics as it applies to the social and behavioral sciences. A knowledge of statistics allows us to make sense of the world, including recognizing when others are using statistical statements to mislead us. We will begin by studying descriptive statistics, which help us to describe the state of the world in terms of averages, distributions and other qualities. We will then turn to inferential statistics, which allow us to test hypotheses about the world and how it works. By the end of the semester, you will be able to…
- Understand basic research methodology
- Collect, organize and summarize raw data
- Calculate basic descriptive statistical measures, such as measure of central tendency and measures of dispersion
- Perform hypothesis tests and interpret basic inferential statistics
- Demonstrate descriptive methods in regression and correlation
- Apply core statistical tools to conduct basic empirical research
Above all, our goal in this course will be to develop the tools necessary to use statistics in the real world and to interpret the statistical findings presented by others. The point of this course is to enhance your life by helping you access and interpret the data in the world that is most relevant to you. To that end, we will rarely focus on the statistics “by themselves,” but rather will learn statistics in the context of real-world applications. As such, you will also learn in this course how to…
- Interpret statistical claims made in the media
- Identify when statistical claims have been used in a misleading way
- Recognize ways that statistics are used in a range of social scientific organizations and professions
- Explain what statistical findings mean to a lay audience (e.g., your friends)
- Make informed recommendations in your workplace, school or family, based on statistical findings
Anti-Racist Assignments
Included in this action plan are ten problem sets:
- A problem set for Measures of Center, looking at rates of unhoused individuals in Los Angeles County over the past ten years, and how this compares to the number of available shelter beds in Los Angeles County
- A problem set for correlations, looking at the relationship between first generation students’ intention to engage in positive academic behaviors and their actual performance of those behaviors.
- A problem set for describing distributions of categorical variables, comparing the representation of different ethnic groups at Pasadena Unified School District as opposed to at Pasadena City College.
- A problem set for probability, looking at probability of recidivism for formerly incarcerated men who did and did not participate in a prison-based yoga program.
- A problem set for normal distributions and the empirical rule, looking at the relationship between food insecurity and stress
- A problem set for the sampling distribution of sample proportions, looking at support for a ballot measure that would restore voting rights to individuals with felony convictions.
- A problem set for using z-scores and 95% confidence intervals for the population proportion, looking at what percent of undocumented individuals choose to register with the DACA program
- A problem set introducing hypothesis testing using a study of perceptions of bias towards LGBTQ individuals.
- A problem set for hypothesis tests for a population proportion, looking at whether vaccination rates in the Black/African-American community were lower than those in other ethnic groups.
- A problem set for confidence intervals for the population mean, looking at rates of endorsement for the goals of the Black Lives Matter movement.