Prof SO Mike

Prof SO Mike
Assistant Professor
Department of Information &
Systems Management
Email: immkpso@ust.hk

• Best Ten Lecturers Award, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001

"Using interesting daily examples in class"

Teaching Statistics is a challenging job as some of my students are anxious about dealing with mathematical formulas. In addition, some may think that Statistics is a subject which shows no relevance to them.

To arouse students' interest and correct their misconceptions about Statistics, I adopt easy-to-understand and interesting real-life cases in class to explain how Statistics does relate to our economy and social aspects. Here are some examples:

1. Explain to my students that regression analysis is a useful tool for predicting future movement of some economic indices, such as GNP, based on some relevant factors like, interest rate, inflation rate and unemployment rate, etc.
2. Use the most recent 'Key Statistics Updated' published by Census and Statistics Department, HKSAR, to let students know more about recent changes in Hong Kong via some statistical figures.
3. Adopt the survey on the 'Number of children born out of wedlock' conducted by the Census and Statistics Department, HKSAR, to illustrate the importance of 'Randomized Response Technique' in collecting sensitive data.

In conclusion, keeping track of recent news and daily examples allows me to build up a closer link between my course materials and everyday life problems so as to let students better understand the subject and apply what they have learnt in future.