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The purpose of this exploratory investigation is to determine if the current content of introductory business undergraduate statistics courses is appropriate given today’s technology. Since this researcher began teaching statistics more than 45 years ago, the content of basic undergraduate business statistics courses seems to have changed little, although the technology available to students has changed significantly. Some of the research will be based on personal, and sometimes anecdotal, observations and comparisons to how technology has changed the required memorized facts and procedural knowledge in other disciplines. With the generally accepted argument that initial failure in undergraduate statistics classes is too high, some researchers have proposed modified teaching approaches to reduce failures. However, it appears that little has changed in the core content, but in some cases, introductory or some foundational content was eliminated to accommodate more time on the core skills. Some schools developed parallel undergraduate business degree programs that reduced the number of required statistics courses, and some schools combined the often-separate descriptive and inferential statistics courses into a single course for more credit hours. These approaches to change have met with some success, but has the time come for more revolutionary change that balances a theoretical foundation with the technological capabilities currently available?

Statistics, Business, Mathematics, Information Systems