<story><title>High school math doesn&apos;t prepare most students for their college majors</title><url>https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-professors-say-high-school-math-doesnt-prepare-most-students-for-their-college-majors/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>chongli</author><text>I agree in principle that statistics education should be given to all students. The problem I have with the proposal is that I have very little confidence that teachers are prepared to provide a rigorous and thorough statistical education.&lt;p&gt;For an example, the replication crisis in the social sciences. These studies, containing flawed statistics, are carried out by social scientists with PhDs who have been required to take courses in statistics designed for their discipline.&lt;p&gt;If they can’t get the statistics right, how can we expect it from teachers with far less education?</text></item><item><author>hn_throwaway_99</author><text>This is essentially the &amp;quot;calculus vs. statistics&amp;quot; debate that has been going on for some time now. I&amp;#x27;m definitely on the side of making statistics mandatory, and then making pre-calc&amp;#x2F;calc electives for motivated students who want to enter STEM fields. Primary reason for this is that I believe a base knowledge of statistics is so important for &lt;i&gt;everyone&lt;/i&gt; in modern society, and it directly goes to better being able to evaluate the constant flood of information we are now all subjected to.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>CrazyStat</author><text>&amp;gt; For an example, the replication crisis in the social sciences. These studies, containing flawed statistics, are carried out by social scientists with PhDs who have been required to take courses in statistics designed for their discipline.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; If they can’t get the statistics right, how can we expect it from teachers with far less education?&lt;p&gt;This isn’t really a statistics education issue, much like Enron wasn’t an accounting education issue.&lt;p&gt;Social scientists abuse statistics because the incentives are all aligned with abusing statistics. To get a good job you have to publish lots of papers. To publish you have to have statistically significant results. To get into top journals you need surprising results. You see other people in your field playing fast and loose with their data and getting rewarded for it. Why not exclude that one problematic subject from your data analysis? Without them the p-value (from a regression on a carefully chosen eight of your eleven measured variables) drops to .038, and you can publish...&lt;p&gt;It’s not that nobody thought to teach the scientists about corrections for multiple comparisons or the dangers of picking observations to exclude as outliers based on what gives you the result you want. They learned all those things. But it’s so much harder to get results when you’re not willing to play games with the data, and they need results. The people who do try to play by the rules wash out, either by choice after getting fed up with the fraud they see all around them or by failing to publish N papers in top journals.</text></comment>
<story><title>High school math doesn&apos;t prepare most students for their college majors</title><url>https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-professors-say-high-school-math-doesnt-prepare-most-students-for-their-college-majors/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>chongli</author><text>I agree in principle that statistics education should be given to all students. The problem I have with the proposal is that I have very little confidence that teachers are prepared to provide a rigorous and thorough statistical education.&lt;p&gt;For an example, the replication crisis in the social sciences. These studies, containing flawed statistics, are carried out by social scientists with PhDs who have been required to take courses in statistics designed for their discipline.&lt;p&gt;If they can’t get the statistics right, how can we expect it from teachers with far less education?</text></item><item><author>hn_throwaway_99</author><text>This is essentially the &amp;quot;calculus vs. statistics&amp;quot; debate that has been going on for some time now. I&amp;#x27;m definitely on the side of making statistics mandatory, and then making pre-calc&amp;#x2F;calc electives for motivated students who want to enter STEM fields. Primary reason for this is that I believe a base knowledge of statistics is so important for &lt;i&gt;everyone&lt;/i&gt; in modern society, and it directly goes to better being able to evaluate the constant flood of information we are now all subjected to.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mp05</author><text>My first &lt;i&gt;real&lt;/i&gt; stats course was a 300-level engineering stats class that kicked my ass pretty well.&lt;p&gt;The class had a calc 3 prereq I found the computation generally the easiest part. Truly grasping the topic takes patience and work but it&amp;#x27;s pretty rewarding. That said, it must be difficult to find genuinely insightful instructors who can make the material remotely interesting because good god it&amp;#x27;s necessary.</text></comment>