Numbers Are Scary

Abstract

Many students find quantitative courses challenging and give up almost before they start. Sometimes that fear can prevent students from being successful even when the actual material is not that difficult. How do we help students over this hurdle of being afraid of numbers? There is not one solution that will help every student, but there are many solutions that may help some students. This talk will illustrate several technology tools that can be used to give students bite-sized chunks of important material for review and maybe give them a little more confidence in their quantitative abilities. The Lightboard Studio in the Romain College of Business allows instructors to create short teaching or review videos that students can watch any number of times, if necessary. This state of the art technology is an easily implemented tool that has broad application for quantitative and non-quantitative content. A second technology tool is JMP® statistical software available to all students and faculty on campus. The use of this easy to use software in courses with even a small statistical component can allow students to focus on using the statistics, rather than calculating statistical values. A third tool is the use of simulations to teach challenging concepts like the Central Limit Theorem, sampling distributions, or the real meaning of confidence intervals. Any of these tools can be incorporated in courses that are totally quantitative or courses that require small modules that are quantitative. In today’s data driven world our students more than ever need quantitative skills and literacy. Students who fully engage the technology tools, both in the classroom and outside the classroom, perform better in the course than those who do not.