We thought that introducing students to R early would build confidence as we taught skills incrementally. Comments from two students from our last post provided support that this may be the way to go in the future, too.
In this post, we thought we would share a little bit about how we approached this.
First, the Applied Methods courses in our school are taught in computer labs, so each student had a computer available during class time. This made our lives infinitely easier when we did in-class activities.
During the first class we did some really simple stuff:
1) We showed the students how to open RStudio and gave them a tour of the panes. We showed them that they would be most interested in looking at datasets, called data frames in R, in the Environment tab. We showed them that they would enter commands and view output in the Console. We also showed them that they would view graphs in the Plots tab in the lower right pane.
2) We opened an existing dataset and showed the students the tabular view by clicking on the spreadsheet icon in the Environment tab. This was a great way to first introduce students to the idea of multiple observations/cases/subjects and variable names.
3) Finally, we encouraged students to download R and RStudio at home since in the following classes there was going to be homework that needed to be completed outside of class. To provide additional support, we pointed them to two videos on our YouTube channel, SSDforR. The first was on installing R and RStudio in a Windows environment and the other was on installing on a Mac. These videos are also accessible from our website at: https://www.ssdanalysis.com/Videos.html
We would love to hear how this worked for our students so feel free to post a comment or send us an email! Also, if you teach or train people to use R, we would also love to hear your ideas!
Unlike SPSS, where home access costs just a shade under an arm and a leg, R being free allowed us to play around with it at our leisure both at home and our offices. Since R is based more around keyboard command specificity rather than a point and click interface, it was helpful to have the option to access R wherever we were when we had a free moment.
ReplyDeleteThe class definitely eased us in gently, even those of us with substandard math backgrounds. Personally, I felt that those first classes could have moved at a faster pace and still been "gentle." I found that once I got the hang of how to open R and enter commands (in the first half of the first day), I could figure most things out pretty quickly on my own using the textbook.
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