Promoting inclusion and a sense of belonging in a new intro stats course
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.52041/iase2023.402Abstract
Public concerns about students’ mental health have been rising across the past decade. In response to local and national calls for institutions of higher learning to attend to student well-being and social inequities, we created a new course named “Happy Intro Stats” (HIS) at our U.S.-based liberal art college in Fall 2022. This is an interactive and fully inclusive introductory statistics course designed to address the importance of self-care on mental health and help students understand inequities in mental health status and access via statistical investigations. A comparative study is conducted between this new HIS course and our traditional intro stats course, taught by the same instructor in the same semester. The impact of embedded self-care practices and inclusive pedagogies on undergraduate student mental health and learning – especially how those intentional designs promote inclusion and students’ sense of belonging in a statistics classroom – is investigated in this paper.References
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