Tackling the anxiety of learning statistics: The mystery of the red envelope     

Melanie A. Robinson  Jean-François Soublière  Marine Agogué  Denis A. Grégoire  Tuvana Rua  Yves Plourde 《Decision Sciences Journal of Innovative Education》2023,21(3):167-176

Most graduate programs in management require students to carry out a substantive research project. However, few management students have a comfortable command of the statistical techniques needed to realize such quantitative projects. This can lead to student anxiety and stress, which challenges instructors to devise ways to build students’ self-efficacy with statistical analysis. Drawing on game-based learning principles, we developed an exercise to help students in a graduate-level research methods course practice these statistical techniques. Designed around a series of four gamified challenges, students perform basic statistical analyses (correlations, t-tests, and simple linear regression) to solve puzzles and unlock a reward hidden in a mysterious red envelope. We used the exercise on seven occasions (five times in the methods course and twice in a graduate program preparatory course). After launching it in fall 2021, we observed that students were engaged and enthusiastic about the exercise. To ascertain its effectiveness more systematically, we collected data in five subsequent sections using a pretest/posttest design (N = 84) which showed that perceptions of statistics self-efficacy increased following the exercise. We conclude by suggesting that our exercise can be tailored to other learning contexts such as management and statistics-centered courses.  相似文献   

Student incentives and preferential treatment in college admissions     

Ivan Pastine  Tuvana Pastine 《Economics of Education Review》2012

We consider a framework in which the optimal admissions policy of a purely academic-quality oriented college implements preferential treatment in favor of the student from the deprived socioeconomic background which maximizes the competition between candidates. We find that the exact form of the preferential treatment admissions policy matters for student incentives and hence for student-body diversity in equilibrium. Preferential treatment policy in college admissions often takes, or is perceived to take, an additive form where the score of the applicant from the deprived background is augmented by a fixed number of points. Such a preferential treatment policy fails to incentivize students from the deprived background. Despite the affirmative action, the level of preferential treatment that achieves academic excellence leaves student-body diversity unchanged compared with a background-blind admissions policy and leads to a higher intergroup score gap.  相似文献