Using Team-Based Learning in the Statistics for Psychology Classroom

Psyc 101 is a "Student Readiness and Curricular" bottleneck course because of its high repeatability rate. It is the 2nd in a 3-course Methods and Statistics sequence that students are required to pass in order to graduate with a BA in Psychology. Psyc 101 is also the first inferential statistics course in the 3-course sequence. First-time students compete with repeating students for a limited number of seats, which leads to increasingly greater bottleneck issues. Redesigning this course using a flipped classroom model will reallocate passive learning to the time spent outside of the classroom, where students read assigned sections of the textbook and do simple skill-building problem sets. This will create more time in class for active learning, via the team-based learning (TBL) structure, where students work in teams to think about and solve increasingly more complex applications of the material they read. Ji Son, the Lead for the Inferential Statistics Course Redesign, and many others have demonstrated an increase in student success in flipped classrooms. My expectation is that this TBL course redesign will lead to a similar reduction in repeatability rate among our students who also leave the semester with a deeper understanding of the topic.