College of Natural Sciences
Please direct all questions about the flag proposal process to the Center for the Skills & Experience Flags.
SDS 301 Introduction to Statistical Methods
Department of Statistics and Data Science
Ethical Reasoning as Course Content: Courses that carry the Ethics Flag teach students to think ethically. Please describe course readings, assignments, and/or activities that require students to engage in ethical reasoning.
Class lectures will provide the initial exposure to ethical issues around statistics. Examples of studies from both peer reviewed journals and studies reported on in news sources will be discussed. Students will be asked to evaluate the studies to consider the motivation behind the study, the harm or benefit that could be cause by discussing the results, issues surrounding the study methods, and issues of missing or incorrect information in the written interpretation of the study. After exposure these concepts in class, students will be asked to explore these issues in graded assignments. After completing their in class group activities which consist of asking a research question, analyzing a dataset to evaluate the question, and then writing up their analysis, students will be asked the same ethics questions to evaluate their results and discuss the way to ethically transmit their data. Students will be asked to do the same thing during their work on their research project which is the culminating experience of the course. For this, students are expected to develop their own research question, collect their own data, analyze and interpret it, and then they will discuss the implications of their results. Students will discuss potential issues with their study, the implications, and ways to ethically transmit their data.
Ethics as an Explicit Component of the Course: The Ethics Flag indicates that students will learn practical ethics, so the connection between ethical content and real-life choices should be made concrete. Please describe how this course gives students the opportunity to apply ethical reasoning to issues relevant to their adult and professional lives.
Although most statistical analysis appears straightforward in results, there is a great deal of information that lies behind the results. In this class we discuss ways in which people can misinterpret data, misrepresent data, or have such biased or confounding studies that their results are not as they seem. In a world in which statistics are frequently represented in the every day news cycle it is important that students understand how to spot misleading or false claims. This course requires students to review studies with a critical lens and discuss ways in which the interpretations of the studies could be misleading or misinterpreted. Additionally, students are asked to analyze their own research conclusions with a critical lens to ensure the ethical transmission of their results in terms of being honest about flaws, and the limitations of their results and conclusion. Students will discuss topics such as ways in which study design can bias results, problems with extrapolating results other populations, and overstating relationships which may be primarily due to lurking variables.
Graded Content Based on Ethical Reasoning: To satisfy the requirements of the Ethics Flag, at least one-third of the course grade must be based on work in practical ethics. Please describe the course grading scheme, indicating how one-third of the course is based on ethical reasoning.
The five in-class group activities (each are 30 points, 150 points total) evaluate ethics content. The total grade for the final poster work is 205 points. These total to 355 out of the 1000 points for the class (35.5%). These assignments were developed after consultation with Dr. Rich to ensure that they incorporated all aspects of ethical reasoning into them.