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Hi All,

In the fall semester I'll be teaching a course titled, "evaluation of engineering data" that involves probability and statistics.  I want to try TBL for this course, and I'm trying to think of good team assignments for in the classroom.  The problem I find is that the course material is usually presented as black & white -- in other words, for a problem there is only one correct answer.  In all the courses that I've seen that use TBL, the team assignments are such that there are multiple good answers and arriving at an answer requires a team to discuss and negotiate the strengths/weaknesses of different answers.  

I've developed classroom exercises to demonstrate ideas.  For example, for confidence intervals I have a bag full of numbers from a distribution.  I have each team pull a sample of numbers and construct a confidence interval.  Each team then draws their confidence interval on the board.  I then draw the actual population mean and show them that even though all their confidence intervals are different, they all contain the mean.  

While I think the above exercise is better than straight lecturing, it doesn't capture the team-based learning that I've seen in other classes.  So, if anybody has any experience in quantitative courses or can direct me to literature on the area, I'll be interested in how they construct team exercises.

Thanks.

Ron.




Ronald Giachetti
Associate Professor
Department of Industrial & Systems Engineering
Florida International University
http://web.eng.fiu.edu/ronald/
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305-348-2980