Teaching Statistics and Quantitative Methods in the 21st Century

Teaching Statistics and Quantitative Methods in the 21st Century is a guide for rethinking and revitalizing statistics and quantitative methods pedagogy for both novice and experienced instructors at undergraduate and graduate levels. It offers modern, transformative approaches to prepare students as future researchers.

Now in its second edition, this ground-breaking volume tackles the question of how introductory statistics and quantitative methods should be taught, drawing on contributions from highly accomplished teachers. Many current textbooks and syllabi remain little changed from those used half a century ago, despite major developments in the field and its role in research. The book rests on a core principle: Introductory teaching should open the pathway to advanced training and equip students to become accomplished researchers.

New chapters address:

• The role of Artificial Intelligence in teaching statistics
• Classroom software applications and applets
• Automated homework generation and grading
• Teaching the replication crisis
• New treatments of p-values, null hypothesis significance testing (NHST) and abduction
• A pedagogical approach based on statistical modeling rather than hypothesis testing

Updated and expanded chapters from the first edition are included alongside these new contributions, presenting both classroom innovations and philosophical challenges to the status quo. The result is a call for a broad reimagining of how statistics and quantitative methods are introduced, designed to engage students, support new instructors, and renew the practice of seasoned teachers.

Joseph Lee Rodgers earned his PhD in quantitative psychology, with a minor in biostatistics, from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1981. He worked at the University of Oklahoma from 1981 to 2012, where he is George Lynn Cross Research Professor Emeritus. He joined the Quantitative Methods program in Peabody College at Vanderbilt in 2012. He retired from that program in 2021 and is Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Human Development at Vanderbilt. He has published three co-authored books, three edited books, and over 200 journal articles/book chapters in Statistics/Quantitative Methods, Psychology, Demography, Behavior Genetics, and related research literature. He has also had a career commitment to classroom teaching and has written many articles in the statistics and quantitative methods literature that are didactic teaching-oriented articles.