• Meeting on 1 May, 2015 at 4:00, Jepson 122, Gonzaga.

• In attendance: Nate Burch, Ta-Tao Chuang, Paul De Palma, Joe Dumoulin, Sam Eckhardt, Stephen Hayes, Aaron Grenz, Marie Marshall, Granger Moch, Rollie Parrish, Vivek Patil, and Putter Tiatragul.

• What happened: There were two presentations during the hour. While Putter Tiatragul from Biology presented his work with crabs and his analysis using R, Sam Eckhardt and Granger Moch (both from the Business School) presented their work on the use of lift charts for comparing multiple logistic regression models to identify those with the highest predictive ability.

• Next meeting: June 5, 2015, Friday, at 4:00 pm, Gonzaga. Room: Jepson 120 (confirmed).
  

Presenter: Dr. Nate Burch, Department of Mathematics at Gonzaga

Title: R as a Teaching Tool
Abstract: Motivated by various national recommendations for statistics pedagogy (outlined in this talk), I’ve began to incorporate R into my 300-level statistics course. I’ll survey many of the ways I have introduced students to R and also show a few tricks I’ve picked up along the way. We’ll discuss some struggles about emphasizing software in a mathematics course, e.g., is using R at odds with mastering theory or does it provide a useful tool for discovery and visualization of complicated concepts?