Role: Graduate Teaching Assistant
Instructor: Sumanta
Basu, Ph.D.
Term: Fall 2020
Course Level: Graduate
Number of Students: \(\sim\) 110
Course Description: Students will learn to develop and use statistical methods to analyze data arising from a wide variety of applications. Students should learn to apply methodologies including descriptive statistics, point and interval estimation, hypothesis testing, inference for a single population, comparisons between two populations, one- and two-way analysis of variance, comparisons among population means, analysis of categorical data, and correlation and regression analysis.
Course Components: This class met twice a week, virtually, for lectures on statistical methodologies. The class also met for smaller, virtual, lab sections once a week. Typically, these lab sections consisted of code demonstrations and problem-solving related to the previous lecture’s content. Students were assessed via weekly homework assignments completed in R as well as two take-home midterm examinations and a take-home final examination. Students also completed a data analysis project on a topic relevant to their own research.
My role: As a graduate teaching assistant, I led one lab section per week for approximately 30 students. In these labs, I developed lessons demonstrating code and problem-solving strategies in R, based on provided topics that were recently covered in lecture. For each lab topic, I developed supplementary slides where students filled-in definitions, equations, and core concepts throughout the lab, leading greater engagement and understanding of the material than coding alone. I also graded student problem sets, exams, and data analysis projects. In addition, I monitored student questions on Piazza (an anonymous question and answer platform) and hosted office hours once a week.
Selected lessons presented: Properties of random variables, confidence intervals, hypothesis testing, categorical data analysis
Student evaluations: Anonymous reviews were elicited from students at mid-semester and at the end of the semester. Reviews were obtained for the entire course and for individual lab sections. My lab section evaluations are provided below for mid-semester and then the end of the semester, respectively.
End-of-semester overall teaching rating: 4.89 / 5.0
Sample materials: