Mentoring students to become professional statisticians through project work

Being able to prepare a data set for analysis, undertaking the analysis and communicating results are essential skills for finding employment as a statistician. The ideal way to help students transition from learning to job ready graduates is to design project work activities and assessments in such a way that students are provided with feedback at each step of their work to enable them to improve what they are doing and to become better communicators of their findings. In a sense, it is similar to an apprenticeship where novices begin their journey to becoming experts under the mentorship of their lecturers. Project units allow students to establish that they can analyse data that is messy to answer research questions, and effectively communicate the results. Project work can be taught by utilising the Aboriginal 8 ways of learning pedagogy to mentor students in an undergraduate and a postgraduate unit in statistics.