We know that the best kinds of writing assignments both deepen students’ understanding of course material and tap into their motivation. But what do these assignments actually look like? A good example is Professor Glenberg’s media assignment (featured below), designed to help students learn how to use statistical reasoning in their everyday lives. Glenberg developed this assignment for Psychology 280, an honors statistics course for first-year and sophomore psychology students. His goal for the assignment matches the larger purpose of the course: to teach students how to tell statistical lies from truths and how to think about statistical issues that affect them.

Glenberg sees the “errors” that students make in this paper as opportunities to promote content-specific learning. “They have a hard time learning the technical definitions of some terms that also have everyday meanings such as ‘population,’ ‘sample,’ and ‘statistic.’” But through this assignment, “students learn to make these discriminations and apply them to their thinking.” As 280 student Ashley Schmuhl puts it, this assignment made use of her statistical knowledge to “asses the validity of a statement rather than just accepting it as truth.”

With the help of a writing center instructor, the TA for the course, Jason Lane, coached students in strategies for succeeding with the assignment. He notes that discussing the differences between summary and analysis, as well as the importance of writing concisely, benefited his students’ final drafts. “The most difficult part for the students,” Lane says, “was finding articles that provided enough information for them to critique and then expanding this information into an organized essay with a clear focus.” To help students with these challenges, Lane and the writing center instructor discussed the strategy of “reverse outlining,” outlining the main ideas of a draft after it has been written. Glenberg and Lane are pleased to share this successful model of a writing-to-learn assignment.

Goal:
This media report is to demonstrate your ability to understand and criticize the use of descriptive statistics in the media.

Requirements:
A 1-2-page written report (worth 15 points) is due September 26. This report should summarize the news article or advertisement and then present your analysis and criticism. Your criticism may be positive (the news article used just the right statistics) or negative. In either case, you must defend your criticism. That is, why are the statistics appropriate or inappropriate? If other statistics should be reported, why are they necessary? Be sure to make your criticism statistical, not on the basis of general knowledge, writing skill, politics, etc. That is, based on your statistical knowledge and the textbook, what additional information should be included?

The article you criticize must present statistical information (as defined in Learning from Data) and not just parameters. Many news articles inappropriately refer to any numbers as “statistics.” For example, suppose a news article reported that the federal government’s budget for education is $5 billion. This is not statistical information (in the sense required for our course). This is a single number that does not have anything to do with a population of scores. On the other hand, suppose the article reported that the average state budget is $5 billion. This number is statistical information because it is the average of a population of scores (the budgets for the 50 individual states). Suppose that an article reported that a person was just discovered who celebrated her 137th birthday, making her the oldest person in the world. Is that statistical information? Suppose the article reported that that life expectancy in Wisconsin is greater than life expectancy in Alabama. Is that statistical information?

Include with your report a copy of the article being criticized or the details (date, time, broadcaster) if in the broadcast media.