With the high demand for data-driven knowledge, students today need to comprehend skills in problem-solving, critical thinking, communication, and collaboration. However, in traditional statistics lectures, students learn descriptive algorithms, hypothesis, and linear regression at their early stage of college. Unfortunately, they often analyze numbers without considering the context, purpose, audience, and the meaning of the numbers. Therefore, providing students the early opportunity to research and write with data in college will allow them to deepen their understanding of the subjects, to think critically about the data and the results, to communicate effectively with diverse audience, and to prepare for their future research. In this article, I propose and demonstrate a novel “Early Entering Research and Writing (EERW)” scheme in introductory college-level statistics. Not only does EERW scheme help students understand and apply statistics to solve real-world problems and communicate effectively, but also lessens the burden of instructor’s assessment task.

Introductory Statistics, Research, Writing, Critical Thinking, Writing Center, Assessment