Coordinator: Albert WONG
Course Description:
This 6-credit English-in-the-Discipline course aims to develop students’ professional and technical communication skills for disciplinary studies in statistical sciences. There are two main components in the course: 1). Case study report writing, 2). professional oral presentation. Students will learn rhetorical skills for presenting and explaining statistical data and trends, and justifying analyses and recommendations convincingly in both written and spoken communication. This will be achieved through analysing samples of case study reports and presentations using a genre-based approach.
Students of the BSc (Actuarial Science) and BASc (Applied AI) are required to take this course. Students who intend to major in decision analytics, risk management, and statistics are strongly encouraged to take this course. Knowledge of linear statistical modelling, covered in courses such as STAT3600 and STAT3907, is recommended but not assumed.
Students majoring in mathematics may take this course if they are interested in broadening their computational and analytical skills acquired from their discipline to include effective communication in data analytics.
Students from other science disciplines should take CAES9820.
Learning Outcomes:
By the end of the course, students should be able to:
- Present and explain mathematical and statistical data and trends using appropriate rhetorical skills in a case study report and an oral presentation
- Organise and articulate coherent ideas with appropriate language devices in a case study report and oral presentation
- Justify analyses and recommendations convincingly in a case study report and an oral presentation
Strategies:
- Students are given a case study and asked to analyse a given dataset. They write up their data analysis, the results, and a discussion of the results in a case study report. Students work in groups for the case study and write a full report together.
- Students are asked to write up the introduction and data analysis sections of the case study report after doing some background research on the topic area and completing data analysis. While students can work with their partners when carrying out the research, the introduction and data analysis sections are written individually.
- Students, in groups of 4, discuss and prepare for a presentation on the case analysis where they present findings from data analysis and propose recommendations on plans and strategies to be adopted by their client(s) in the case scenario.
- Each presenter will present for up to approximately 5 minutes and respond to questions from the audience who play the role of the presenters’ clients. They will need to select what information to present and decide how to present it. They should use a range of rhetorical features of oral presentations in order to engage with the target audience such as effective use of visuals and voice. These features will be covered in the course.
- Students will need to collaborate effectively for both the case study report writing and the oral presentation.
Assessment Methods:
(with breakdown of percentage weighting of the various methods)
- Other genres of writing (30%)
- Group learning work (30%)
- Oral Presentations (40%)