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Guidelines for Undergraduate Programs in Statistical Science Updated

1 January 2015 1,190 views One Comment

The widely quoted McKinsey & Company report, Big Data: The Next Frontier for Innovation, Competition, and Productivity, predicts a shortage of up to 190,000 workers with deep analytical skills and 1.5 million managers and analysts to manage data projects. A number of these workers will be holders of bachelor’s degrees in statistics. How can we prepare these graduates to have the appropriate skills to make sense of the information around them?

Report-on-Undergrad-Education To help answer that question, 2014 ASA President Nathaniel Schenker appointed a working group to help ensure bachelor’s graduates have the necessary capacities to use data to make evidence-based decisions. Out of that working group came the updated ASA Curriculum Guidelines for Undergraduate Programs in Statistical Science. These guidelines were adopted in November by the ASA Board of Directors and replace guidelines adopted in 2000. The updated guidelines were developed by a group of ASA members chaired by Nicholas Horton. Other members included Beth Chance, Steve Cohen, Scott Grimshaw, Johanna Hardin, Tim Hesterberg, Roger Hoerl, Chris Malone, Rebecca Nichols, and Deborah Nolan.

The guidelines call for adaptations to the undergraduate curriculum to account for the increased importance of data analysis, teamwork, communications, and other relevant skills and experiences in today’s practice of statistics.

“These new guidelines recognize the increasing importance of the practice of statistics to solving the complex problems faced by business, industry, and government entities,” said Horton. “These new curriculum guidelines will help ensure graduates have the skill set to tackle the more rigorous data analysis challenges that our society faces. These data-analytics skills are needed by society and employers in our increasingly information-rich world.”

The ASA report also notes enrollments in statistics classes have increased dramatically. The Integrated Post-Secondary Education Data System Completions Survey, conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics, shows the number of bachelor’s graduates in statistics has increased more than four-fold since ASA guidelines were first issued: from 380 in 2000 to 1,656 in 2013.

The curriculum outlined in the Curriculum Guidelines for Undergraduate Programs in Statistical Science stresses the integration of knowledge and skills in the following four key areas:

  • Statistical Methods and Theory: Statistical theory, exploratory and graphical data analysis methods, design of studies and issues of bias, and statistical modeling

  • Data-Related and Computation: Use of one or more professional statistical software environments and multiple data tools, data management, programming, and simulation

  • Mathematical Foundation: Calculus, linear algebra, probability, with emphasis on connections between these courses and their application

  • Statistical Practice: Effective technical writing, visualization, and presentation skills; teamwork and collaboration; and ability to interact with a variety of clients and collaborators

“These guidelines will ensure that undergraduate statistics programs provide their students appropriate training for a career in statistics,” said 2015 ASA President David Morganstein. “The ASA leadership and the members of the undergraduate guidelines work group strongly encourage the leaders and faculty of each undergraduate statistics program to read and apply these updated guidelines so their students are fully prepared to thrive in our increasingly data-centric world.”

“There is a pressing need to ensure we have quantitative scientists, including statisticians, with the ability to bridge the technology and information transfer gap in order to accelerate our understanding of disease biology, etiology, and prognosis and innovations in disease prevention and treatment,” said Xihong Lin, professor of biostatistics at Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health and member of the Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics at the National Research Council. “These guidelines are very timely, insightful, and thoughtful. They can help to prepare this next generation of analysts to effectively translate these data into knowledge and contribute to making new discoveries in health sciences.”

The report also includes recommendations for curriculum topics for minors or concentrations in statistics and discussions about the relationships of the undergraduate statistics curriculum with the growing number of high-school and community college courses in statistics and master’s programs in statistics.

Horton also noted a variety of white papers are in development that will help steer undergraduate statistics departments through the process of implementing the new curriculum guidelines. Topics broached in these papers include “data science and the undergraduate curriculum,” “learning outcomes for undergraduate programs in statistical science” and “roadmap for smaller schools.”

Download a PDF of the guidelines or visit the ASA website for details.

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One Comment »

  • PeterBan said:

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