Using games to improve students’ engagement and understanding of statistics in higher education

Summary

In this article we present a series of light-touch, easy to implement, classroom activities designed to improve students’ understanding and interpretation of regression coefficients. Using an experiment, we evaluate the effectiveness of the activities by randomly allocating first-year undergraduate students into a seminar with the activities (treatment group) or not (control group). We demonstrate that the classroom activities have a large, positive effect on several domains including engagement (measured by seminar attendance), enjoyment of learning (measured by an end-of-term student satisfaction survey), and their understanding of the material (measured by test scores). These results suggest that adopting more varied pedagogical approaches to teaching statistics/econometrics can benefit students.