Travis Ricks, assistant professor of psychology, will explore whether having knowledge of or interest in a topic helps or hinders how a student learns statistics during an Oct. 9 Honors Council Lecture at Bemidji State University.

His lecture, “Effects of Cover Stories on Problem Solving in a Statistics Course,” will be held Oct. 9 at 7 p.m. in Hagg-Sauer 107. Honors Council lectures are open to everyone free of charge.

Following a lesson given to an introductory psychology course, Ricks gave half of the students in the class a worksheet written with a baseball cover story while the other half received a weather cover story. The quiz included two kinds of questions, and measures of a student’s knowledge of and interest in baseball were collected.

“The results indicated that, overall, the students performed better on computation items than explanation items,” Ricks said. “And the weather example led to better performance on the explanation items than the baseball example.”

No differences were seen in performance on the quiz as a function of gender, prior knowledge or interest, Ricks said.

“If anything, the results indicated that interest in baseball seemed to hinder learning in the baseball condition,” Ricks said.

His lecture discusses possible reasons for the performance differences due to the cover story.

About Travis Ricks
Ricks is from Felt, Idaho, a small town of 30 people, where he grew up on a potato farm at the foot of the Grand Teton Mountains. He learned to love statistics and became interested in learning how students learn statistics while pursuing his bachelor’s degree in psychology at Idaho State University. He holds a doctorate in cognitive psychology from the University of Illinois at Chicago.

About the Honors Council Lecture Series
The Honors Council Lecture Series is hosted by the Bemidji State University Honors Council. The council is the advisory group to the honors program comprised of 12 faculty members from each of the University’s colleges. Student representatives are also elected to the council by their cohorts for one-year terms.

Contacts
• Kari Caughey, BSU honors program; (218) 755-3984
• Travis Ricks, assistant professor of psychology; (218) 755-2106

Bemidji State University, located in northern Minnesota’s lake district, occupies a wooded campus along the shore of Lake Bemidji. Enrolling more than 5,000 students, Bemidji State offers more than 50 undergraduate majors and nine graduate programs encompassing arts, sciences and select professional programs. BSU is a member of the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities system and has a faculty and staff of more than 550. University signature themes include environmental stewardship, civic engagement and global and multi-cultural understanding.