Creativity and Depth in Open-Ended Projects

Programming is an essential component of a growing number of introductory statistics courses. Many introductory statistics courses use R to put concepts introduced in the course into practice, and these courses often serve as many students’ first introduction to R and programming. While some faculty choose to teach R using base R syntax, others introduce R using packages from the tidyverse. Although some have strong opinions on how to start with R, the literature on evidence-based comparative studies on learning R with base R compared to the tidyverse syntax is lacking. We analyzed 205 final projects in an introductory statistics course taught between the 2013-2016 academic years, evaluating each project on creativity, depth, and multivariate visualizations. We found that students introduced to R with packages from the tidyverse scored higher, on average, on these metrics. Based on these findings, we created resources designed for future use in introductory statistics instruction.