A Design of Experiments Workshop as an Introduction to Statistics

Abstract In this department The American Statistician publishes articles, reviews, and notes of interest to teachers of the first mathematical statistics course and of applied statistics courses. The department includes the Accent on Teaching Materials section; suitable contents for the section are described under the section heading. Articles and notes for the department, but not intended specifically for the section, should be useful to a substantial number of teachers of the indicated types of courses or should have the potential for fundamentally affecting the way in which a course is taught. A workshop introduction to statistics is described. Students collect data from themselves in a small factorial experiment to investigate characteristics of short-term memory. With some guidance, student groups both choose the variables to investigate and organize the collection of their data. They learn to tabulate and display the data in ways to understand the ideas of main effects and interactions; the disadvan...