Exploring challenges and strategies in teaching hypothesis testing to engineering students from the perspective of educators

The study of hypothesis tests is essential in the training of engineers and although in recent years students’ knowledge has been investigated, it is necessary to develop studies from the perspective of professors who teach this topic in engineering. For this reason, in this paper we present, from the teachers’ perspective, the difficulties and errors exhibited by engineering students, the teaching methodologies and the resources available in relation to hypothesis testing. For this, a conceptual framework with ideas on statistical reasoning for inference was used. In this qualitative research, 19 teachers participated, to whom two questionnaire-type instruments were applied. Among the main results we have that, students have great difficulties with the approach of statistical hypotheses and the study of parameters in two populations, even when teachers attribute a high degree of importance to hypothesis tests in the subject of statistics for engineers.

Kimelfe