service teaching, a drop-in help centre and statistics cdc steele university of manchester

Service Teaching, a Drop-in Help Centre and Statistics

CDC Steele

University of Manchester

Service Teaching in Statistics by School of Mathematics

Service Teaching in Statistics by School of Mathematics

• Service Teaching : Teaching by school of maths to students in other schools.– Teach methods that will help students with

their other courses– Provide tools that will give general help to

students in courses and in subsequent career– Provide discipline that will help generally in

parent discipline– Provide enough theory that tools and methods

can be adapted for unseen situations

Service Teaching in Statistics

• Service Teaching : Teaching by school of maths to students in other schools.– Teach students to carry out simple tests in

analysis of data e.g. hypothesis tests.– Give students some appreciation of the power

and place of the various tests– Give students an appreciation of which claims

can be backed up with statistical ideas– Give underlying theory so that tests can be

adapted

Service teaching in Statistics

• Course 0F2 to Foundation Year:

• MATHFS552 Probability / Statistics– Mainly probability but includes– Working with normal distribution– Mean and standard deviation


• Course 1X1 to 1st Year Computer Science:

• COMP10020– Mainly probability


• Course 2M1/2P1 to 2nd Year Engineers:

• MATH29631/29651/29661 Probability / Statistics– Sample mean, standard deviation; – confidence interval; – hypothesis; – chi-squared goodness of fit test; – simple linear regression.


• Course 2T1 to 2nd Year Textiles students:• MATH2953

• Representation of data; frequency distributions and histograms.

• Basic statistical inference. Random Samples, sampling distributions. Sampling, properties of sample means, tendency to normal distribution.

• Use of statistical packages. • Confidence Intervals. • Hypothesis testing; null and alternative hypothesis,

critical region. Significance level. Hypothesis tests; one and two-sample t-tests for means; paired t-test; F-test for two variances.

• Relationships between variables. Linear regression, prediction, confidence intervals. F-test for one- and two-way analysis of variance and experimental designs.


• Scope for further course (possibly based on MATH29531) in general statistics for students throughout the university.


• Challenges– A good engineer / scientist / medic /

economist / other is not necessarily a good mathematician

– Neither is necessarily a good statistician


• Challenges– Sometimes, the necessity to lead students

away from simply putting numbers into formulae and understanding / appreciating what is being taught.


• Challenges– Finding data sufficiently simple as to be a

good example of the tool/method but which is, nevertheless, real data.

Manchester Mathematics Resource Centre and Statistics

Manchester Mathematics Resource Centre

• Drop-in help-desk open 20 hours per week.

• Advisors are academic staff or postgraduate students

• Located in George Begg Building / C6

• Open 20 hours per week during term time.

• http://www.maths.manchester.ac.uk/service/resource-centre/

Statistics at the Resource Centre

• 3 dedicated sessions. – Tuesday 11-12. Dr J Moriarty– Thursday 1-2. Dr P Foster– Friday 1-2. Mr H Chao (pg)

• Other advisors able to answer certain queries or refer callers to these sessions


• Types of Enquiry

– Course Related

• Example on tutorial sheet

• Question on past paper

• Query on notes


• Types of Enquiry

– Project Related

• Question about data-analysis, tests etc.

service teaching, a drop-in help centre and statistics cdc steele university of manchester

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