The project aims to design and implement an Adaptive LEArning system for Statistics (ALEAS) that will be used to reduce the gap spotted in Statistics courses. Targets groups of ALEAS are undergraduate university students attending first courses in statistics in several degree programs: from Psychology, to Political Science, Humanities and Social Sciences, Primary Education. ALEAS must be intended as an innovative and complementary tool with respect to the traditional courses in Statistics and it will offer personalized learning paths to students, with the purpose to provide them remedial advices to deal with the "statistics anxiety". The use of real world examples taken from the specific domains aims to motivate the students' interest and curiosity for Statistics. ALEAS will also represent a useful work tool for teachers because at the end of a course or of a learning session, it will provide statistics about the impact of the adaptive learning system on the learning capability of the class. The system will be experimented and tuned among the undergraduate classes in Statistics of the involved partners' institutions. The project involves German, Greece, Italy and Spain, with the following partners: - Jacob University Bremen - Democritus University of Thrace - University of Naples Federico II - Universitat Politecnica de Valencia - Smarted The educational systems of the partners are characterized by the general problematic of a low students' performance in quantitative courses, as corroborated also by inspecting the results of the PISA tests, the OECD's Program for International Students Assessment. However, each of the involved countries has specific strengths and experience, in such a way that they can benefit from each other and from sharing practices. These countries constitute a representative sample of Europe, and can be replicated across other Member States. The contact person of each Academic partner is a Professor in Statistics, with a long-term teaching experience. The research team of each partner also involves researchers with expertise in statistics education and learning assessment in education. Such an expertise is crucial for the project because complementing the adaptive system several assessment activities will be developed. Partner universities have direct access to teacher educators, which will facilitate the recruitment of participants. In most cases, teacher educators perform courses directly at the University, which will simplify the management of the project activities. ALEAS will be realized exploiting the most innovative and digital technologies embedded in an open access framework. The project will be designed taking into account young people's habits and preferences in the digital era. ALEAS will support students' learning providing several resources (tests, videos, cartoons, texts). All the resources will be inserted in an on-line system and will be usable also through mobile devices. The system will be designed with the focus on the application of quantitative methods in real life, stimulating students to appreciate the importance of Statistics in their future professions. Such design guideline is intended to face with skills gap and to strengthen the diffusion of statistical literacy. The system will be inclusive for students which show a general difficulty with respect to quantitative courses. ALEAS will exploit videos and cartoons to speak the same language of digital natives. The main expected benefits are represented by a reduction of the performance gap and an improvement of empowerment of students attending Statistics courses. Moreover, the intellectual outputs will be useful also in the perspective of lifelong learning. Since Statistics has become an essential tool for facing with the big amount of data at our disposal, some intellectual outputs of the project, in particular the short video tutorials and the cartoons, will be fruitful to prepare an online course on statistical literacy in everyday life. Such type of resources will help the training of informed citizens, able to make sense of chance, risk and probability. ALEAS will be organized in modular units. For each unit of a course, the project will provide: - a set of questions with a different level of difficulty - materials (video and slides) useful for a complete understanding of the techniques used in the unit - short video lectures to recap basic aims, assumptions and traps of the involved statistical tools - examples of real life applications of the statistical tools - cartoons to captivate the attention of the students on advantages and drawbacks of the methods - web-based applet and animated tools to stimulate students to experience the statistical techniques. ALEAS will be forerun and followed by several assessment activities that will be carried out separately for each course under investigation: diagnostic assessment, anxiety assessment, motivation building, formative assessement, impact assessement.
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