By virtue of its title Innovations in Education and Teaching International<\/em> sets its aspirations very high. I\u2019ve just been browsing the latest printed edition where Stewart and Stewart\u2019s article \u2018Teaching Bayesian Statistics to Undergraduate Students through Debates\u2019 grabbed my attention. Like most people I have been educated in classical (or frequentist) statistics and have virtually no knowledge of Bayesian statistics\u2014hence the title caught my attention. The article has therefore reminded me to rectify my ignorance.<\/p>\n

The title gave me no clue to what I was about to read about though. The lecturer (second author Wayne Stewart) performs debates between \u2018frequentists\u2019 and \u2018Bayesians\u2019 using two ventriloquist dummies\u2014Freaky the frequentist and his opponent, a doll depicting Thomas Bayes<\/a> (c.1701-1761) in his persona as a Presbyterian minister (photographs appear in the article).<\/p>\n

Personally I find ventriloquist dolls pretty sinister. However as an approach worthy of the label \u2018innovation\u2019, it\u2019s going to be hard to surpass. Most of the students found the dummies funny though and claimed to have learned from them.<\/p>\n

Sepideh Stewart and Wayne Stewart (2014). \u201cTeaching Bayesian Statistics to Undergraduate Students through Debates.\u201d Innovations in Education and Teaching International<\/em><\/a> 51, no. 6: 653\u201363.<\/p>\n

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  By virtue of its title Innovations in Education and Teaching International sets its aspirations very high. I\u2019ve just been browsing the latest printed edition where Stewart and Stewart\u2019s article \u2018Teaching Bayesian Statistics to Undergraduate Students through Debates\u2019 grabbed my attention. Like most people I have been educated in classical (or frequentist) statistics and have virtually … Continue reading Freaky teaching: Teaching Bayesian Statistics to Undergraduate Students using ventriloquist dummies<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[59,66],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1907","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-research","category-statistics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johncanning.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1907","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/johncanning.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/johncanning.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johncanning.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johncanning.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1907"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/johncanning.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1907\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1910,"href":"https:\/\/johncanning.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1907\/revisions\/1910"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johncanning.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1907"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johncanning.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1907"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johncanning.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1907"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}