Despite the increasing use of the statistical programming language R in statistics and data analysis (SDA), its implementation in communication science education is limited. Experiences, recommendations, and a critical exchange are therefore scarce. The following contribution addresses this very gap. At the Department of Journalism and…

When incorporating programming into a statistics course, there are many pedagogical considerations. In R, one consideration is the particular R syntax used. This article reports on a head-to-head comparison of a pair of introductory statistics labs, one conducted in the formula syntax, the other in tidyverse. Pre- and post-surveys show minimal…

To meet the demands of industry, undergraduate business curricula must evolve to prepare analytics-enabled professionals in fields such as finance, accounting, human resource management, and marketing. In this article, we provide a case study of developing a rigorous, integrated finance and data analytics course that was delivered using a…

We developed an interactive online textbook that interleaves R programming activities with text as a way to facilitate students' understanding of statistical ideas while minimizing the cognitive and emotional burden of learning programming. In this exploratory study, we characterize the attitudes and experiences of 672 undergraduate students as…

R and Python are commonly used software languages for data analytics. Using these languages as the course software for the introductory course gives students practical skills for applying statistical concepts to data analysis. However, the reliance upon the command line is perceived by the typical nontechnical introductory student as sufficiently…

Data science surrounds us in contexts as diverse as climate change, air pollution, route-finding, genomics, market manipulation, and movie recommendations. To open the "data-science-black-box" for lower secondary school students, we developed a data science teaching unit focusing on the analysis of environmental data, which we embedded…

SCRATCH, developed by the Media Lab at MIT, is a kid-friendly visual programming language, designed to introduce programming to children and teens in a "more thinkable, more meaningful, and more social" way. Although it was initially intended for K-12 students, educators have used it for higher education as well, and found it…