Lisa Dierker
Wesleyan University

My Story

I was still in my 20s when I arrived at Wesleyan University, fresh off a 3-year post-doctoral fellowship at the Yale School of Medicine. When asked to teach a research methods course, I had what felt like a brilliant idea driving home from the grocery store one day. I would not use a textbook and I would not deliver lectures. My own classroom training had been ineffective and uninspiring. As I tell my students, I learned 20 different kinds of post hoc tests but didn’t understand when or why to actually use one. So, instead of drowning my own students in information the way I had been drowned, I decided to get them involved with large, real-world data sets and support them in conducting original research. I would teach them what they needed to know when they needed to know it and not before. Their own questions would drive the learning and I would help them to experience the research process from start to finish. Passion-Driven Statistics was born!

Ten years later, it would become a multidisciplinary introductory statistics course at Wesleyan and a National Science Foundation funded model serving thousands of students across disciplines and educational environments in the United States and Internationally (e.g., Canada, Ghana, Nigeria, Philippines, Peru, United Kingdom, and still reaching). Passion-Driven Statistics is now a widely used project-based curriculum that has been implemented as a statistics course, a research methods course, a data science course, a capstone experience, and a summer research boot camp. Liberal arts colleges, large state universities, regional colleges and universities, medical schools, community colleges, and high schools have all successfully implemented the model.

The curriculum has been found to attract higher rates of under-represented minority (URM) students compared to a traditional statistics course and students enrolled in Passion-Driven Statistics are more likely to report increased confidence in working with data and increased interest in pursuing advanced statistics coursework (Dierker et al., 2018). This project-based approach also promotes further training in statistics. Using causal inference techniques to achieve matched comparisons across three different statistics courses, students originally enrolled in Passion-Driven Statistics were significantly more likely to take at least one additional undergraduate course focused on statistical concepts, applied data analysis, and/or the use of statistical software compared to students taking either an activity-based psychology statistics course or a math statistics course (Nazzaro, et al., 2020). In more recent research Passion-Driven Statistics has been found to be associated post-graduation with a higher likelihood of holding a job in which a primary responsibility includes working with data, greater confidence in working with data, and a higher likelihood of earning more than $100K annually (Dierker et al., in press).

A New Role

I always thought that I understood the ingredients that make Passion-Driven Statistics so empowering, and if asked, I would have told you about the opportunity to ask your own research questions, or I would have pointed to its just-in-time and need-to-know approach to content knowledge, or even its focus on technical skills in the service of disciplinary content and critical thinking. This year, I stepped back in to teach the course after several years away from it. Seeing it with fresh eyes more than 20 years after that first spark of inspiration made me realize that so much of its power comes from the simple act of new learners teaching newer learners.

I used to be the “new learner,” understanding exactly what it felt like to encounter and struggle with the abstract concepts, disciplinary jargon, mathematical complexity, and the arcane programming syntax involved in authentic research. Two decades later, I find that my role in the course has changed. I am no longer a new learner, and as much as I try to recreate that space and those feelings in myself, the “curse of knowledge” and my hard-won expertise hold me back. Now, I am recognizing an entirely new role in providing support to those former Passion-Driven Statistics students who have generously stepped in as peer mentors, warmly guiding our newest generation of students in the same empowering way that I was able to all those years ago. They are now the new learners teaching our newer learners from a place of empathy, passion, patience, high expectations, and mutual support. Every day in class, I see them using their new learners’ superpowers to inspire others, to explain concepts by getting to the simpler, more digestible parts faster, and to understand students’ perspectives in a deeply genuine way. I have loved watching them hone their skills in listening, adapt to the needs of the individual students and nurture them in ways that meaningfully impacted their own educational trajectory when they played the role of the newer learner.

Working this semester with some of the current peer mentors, Joyce Sun, Erin Byrne, and Luis Perez, has reminded me that Passion-Driven Statistics is as much a culture as it is a course. It is a space where no one needs to know everything, where we can all bring our best stuff, and where moral support and compassionate engagement allow our students to become the heroes of their own learning. Together, we take students out of their comfort zone and then love them through the fallout by creating an inviting classroom and an experience that gives students a safe and supportive space to get things wrong before they get them right.

While my role as expert in this space may continue to be necessary and even valuable on rare occasions, it is also wholly insufficient. It is only together with new learners, our newer learners, and expert voices that we hold the necessary and sufficient ingredients to change lives in the data analytics space. I know, it sounds rather dramatic, but it is! 

And if that were not enough, I am also marveling at the chorus that I have continued to hear from peer mentors across the years, that they “learn more as a peer mentor” than they did when taking the Passion-Driven Statistics course for the first time. Though secondary and post-secondary education continues to resist the power of learning through teaching, it is the most untapped, cost positive tool that we currently have as educators. I believe that it is stronger even than the current promises of AI. Peer mentors may serve as volunteers, be paid through student work programs or training grants, or receive course credit as teaching assistants or through course designations (e.g., statistics education practicum). It does not have to be a promise for the future. We have everything that we need right now.

The Next Step

You might be interested to learn that my time away from teaching Passion-Driven Statistics has been spent designing a new project-based curriculum aimed at reimagining General Education. The goal of this new initiative is to expose students to a wide range of digital skills as they learn traditional disciplinary content. Within our digital “Introduction to Psychology” course, students explore concepts and content in the field of psychology through video storytelling, programming, data visualization, web development, design and more. This novel curriculum is aimed at solidifying new content knowledge, exposing students to modern digital tools, and providing them with the opportunity to create new learning artifacts.

And with this, I have found myself a new learner again, not just conquering new content outside of my research subdiscipline, but learning new tools, new skills, new design principles and being useful again the way only a new learner can be. All this newness is of course accompanied by uncertainty, vulnerability, and the distinct possibility of utter failure. It is hard and that is what I love about it. I find myself feeling inspired again and eager to bound out of bed in the morning to face new challenges and to find the transformative experience that I first found in the Passion-Driven Statistics classroom all those years ago.

I am always eager to network with passionate instructors excited about things we have not even imagined yet. Please feel free to reach out at ldierker@wesleyan.edu.

Resources for Passion-Driven Statistics are available at https://passiondrivenstatistics.com/. Some that you might find particularly useful include a free e-book and translation code aimed at supporting the use of diverse statistical software. Resources for Digital Intro are available at https://digitalintro.wescreates.wesleyan.edu/. I encourage you to take advantage of our introductory psychology lessons and project videos on our Youtube Channel. I am also happy to share a new project sharing platform, OpenLab, where students can get inspired, post learning artifacts, and share their work and learning by creating a free digital portfolio. Follow us on Instagram or check us out on LinkedIn to learn more!