Hostage of the Software: Experiences in Teaching Inferential Statistics to Undergraduate Human-Computer Interaction Students and a Survey of the Literature

Abstract

Students’ knowledge of inferential statistics is lacking in many computer science study programs. Yet, the needs for inferential statistical skills have emerged with new fields of study such as human-computer interaction involving observation of human activity. This paper presents experiences teaching inferential statistics to undergraduate computer science students with a focus on the actual goals of the investigations and not the mechanisms and mathematics of statistics. The teaching framework involves teaching statistics as a set of systematic black-box tools.