Re: st: advice on using Stata in an undergraduate Intro Stats course

["JVerkuilen (Gmail)" <jvverkuilen@gmail.com>]

On Wed, Jan 23, 2013 at 1:02 PM, Doug Hess <douglasrhess@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> Some questions for those with teaching experience:
>
> 1) Have you found--or do you believe that--it is useful to have
> students learn a bit of Stata for this sort of course? (The college
> has a campus license.)

I have mixed feelings about it and think there's definitely a
chicken/egg problem. Computer knowledge is dangerous if the course
becomes about the package and not about the material. On the other
hand, incorporating the computer more:

(a) reaches students where they are, as modern students are more
computer savvy than most of us non-digital natives (and some are
shockingly poor!)
(b) gives them a taste of what the future holds
(c) allows you to discard artificialities created by all the hand
calculation that accompanies a traditional course, such as the complex
rules for when to use the t table vs. the z table which just as often
depend on the table printed in the book, or lets you use bootstrapping
and other resampling ideas from the get go
(d) allows you to teach visualization more prominently.

So I'm torn. What I think would very much work is to have a year long
sequence that went over this with a lab component that incorporated
computer aspects. Whether any given curriculum could allow for that is
a different question.


>
> 2) Are there textbooks (or on-line books/websites) that use Stata for
> a beginners intro to statistics (and/or probability)? I.e., not just
> intro to Stata, but intro to Stata for learning stats from the
> starting square? (The difference between two such books/websites could
> be the order in which material is introduced, the complexity of the
> problems or examples, assumptions of previous knowledge, etc.)
>

I can't say enough good about the ATS web page at UCLA.
http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/

I'm not sure it has material specifically on what you want but it
probably does.


> 3) Anybody care to share syllabi for this sort of course (using Stata,
> or not)? [Please respond off line by emailing me directly if you want
> to send a file, of course.]

I don't have such a syllabus but would be interested in talking about
this on-list, as I know there are some good instructors out there.
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