Teaching

Teaching Philosophy

I believe that the best way to teach students statistics is to have them work with real data to answer questions related to topics that are important to them. In my courses, students learn to analyze raw Statistics Canada survey data using leading statistical clients. Learning is structured in five stages that reflect the actual research process: 1) thinking in variables, 2) finding data, 3) cleaning data an creating variables, 4) analysis and inference, and 5) drawing conclusions.

SOC 225: AN INTRODUCTION TO SURVEY RESEARCH AND DATA ANALYSIS IN SOCIOLOGY

Data is transforming the world we live in. In this course students are introduced to data, and then learn basic skills for analyzing it, and harnessing its power to make inferences about the real world. Over the course of the term, students locate and work with Statistics Canada data to analyze a variable that is related to a topic of their choice.

SOC 325: APPLIED QUANTITATIVE RESEARCH IN SOCIOLOGY

In SOC 225 students learn about distributions and statistical inference, but they only consider variables in isolation of one another. In SOC325, students begin to consider relationships among variable and causality. Once again students locate and work with Statistics Canada data, but this time to analyze a relationship that is related to a topic of there choice. The second half of the term introduces students to regression analysis.