Teaching stats and programming

I am thrilled to share that my article “Bringing the World to the Classroom: Teaching Statistics and Programming in a Project-Based Setting” is published in PS: Political Science and Politics as an open-access article. I set up and tested the concept while teaching programming and statistics classes. It gives instructors a blueprint for teaching stats and programming in a project-based setting. It also shows how this can be applied in a virtual format or as a block seminar and how to integrate open science and peer group support practices in this teaching setting. While I use my introductory R course as a working example, the format can be applied to any course setting that requires students to learn (and most importantly practice) “hands-on” material!

I also highlighted some students‘ projects in the article — and if the word limit had permitted, I would have mentioned even more to show how creative and innovative the students‘ projects were! 🥳

I am incredibly thankful to Sabine Carey for allowing me to teach (and test) my methods classes in different settings (online and offline, seminar long and in a block seminar) and giving me the freedom to create the methods course I would have enjoyed when being a student. I would also like to thank Dennis Hammerschmidt, Anna-Lena Hönig, and Melanie Klinger for discussing earlier ideas of this course and for providing the best “teachers’ training” with the HDZ I could have wished for. And, of course, as the teaching part is only one side of the whole adventure, it wouldn’t have been so much fun if there weren’t curious and ambitious students who were willing to embark on this journey and to learn something new! 👏

The article comes with supplementary material: a syllabus template in LaTeX, an R Markdown template for data analysis that I used throughout the course, and a term paper template in R Markdown. If you’re interested, the supplementary material is online on Dataverse 👩🏼‍💻 ¹

And, to further spark the fire of R, all this wouldn’t have been possible without such a great community that also provides accessible, high-quality online resources for free – my special thanks go to RStudio, R-Ladies, and CorrelAid!

1. If you click on the tree-based display, the order of the files and folders becomes more accessible:  ↩︎