COLLABORATIVE TESTING IN SOCIAL STATISTICS - TOWARD GEMEINSTAT

Teaching statistics to liberal arts majors is often complicated by students' inadequate mathematical backgrounds and concomitant ''math anxiety.'' Discussions of how to manage the adverse effects of these influences on students' performance are usually incomplete. They focus exclusively on students' individual inadequacies and suggest remedial treatment aimed at such personal deficiencies. A proposal for redirecting the focus of such concerns to incorporate the structural dimensions of statistics instruction is offered, and an alternative to traditional individual testing is explored Collaborative testing operates to alleviate, or at least to mitigate, examination anxiety, a major source of the debilitating math anxiety that many students endure. As the collaborative testing format evolves, it may transform the social statistics examination into a dynamic leaming process rather than an event to be regarded with fear and trepidation. Ultimately a process of Gemeinstat is suggested in place of the conventional Gesellstat.