Expected Outcome-Based Delivery and Assessment of Statistics Courses for Graduate Students in a Nigerian University.

Statistics, an applied branch of Mathematics, is perhaps the most challenging study area to graduate students in the fields of Agriculture. Two Statistics courses are compulsory for graduate students in the Department of Crop Production and Protection (CPP), Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU), Ile-Ife, Nigeria: CPP 613 – Statistical Methods, followed by CPP 614 – Design and Analysis of Experiments, offered during the Harmattan and Rain Semester, respectively. Because most students performed poorly in the course exams, the expected outcome-based delivery and assessment approach was used for the course in the last four academic years. The expected outcome is the student’s ability to skillfully demonstrate or apply the knowledge gained in both courses by accurate statistical analysis of experimental data, and correct interpretation of the outputs from the analysis. The objective of this study was to evaluate the actual outcomes of CPP 613 and 614 offered for four academic years. The courses involved manual and computer software approaches to lectures, weekly assignment for continuous assessment, a 3-hr comprehensive final examination (venue exam) and the students took home the same question paper and submitted their answers 0800 hrs the following morning (take-home exam). Scores of 80 and 50 students were analyzed for the two courses, respectively. Students’ performance in the venue exam was 4 to 74% (mean=31.7±1.76) in CPP 613 and 5 to 64% mean=33.7±2.07) in CPP 614. Take-home exam scores were 29-86% (mean= 58.3±1.33) for CPP 613 and 41-84% (mean=67.9±1.32) for CPP 614. Take-home exam reduced the proportion of students scoring F-grade from 82.5% to 13.8% in CPP 613 and from 73.5% to 2% in CPP 614. Performance in take-home exam was greatly (>75%) independent of the venue exam. Conclusively, take-home examination was effective in attaining the expected outcome of statistics courses for low-achieving Agriculture graduate students.