College-level math is a big obstacle to graduation for many California students — and statistics is often the biggest roadblock within the curriculum.

Universities are revisiting a decades-old effort to improve the teaching of statistics by focusing introductory classes on concepts and showing how they apply in the real world before teaching the formulas that trip up many students.

Listen to the interview at KPCC.

In 2003, UC Irvine Statistics Professor Jessica Utts has been calling for statistics curriculum reform for decades. She was inspired, in part, by the college experiences of her mother and her sister.

“They had really opposite experiences,” she said. “My mother had a wonderful experience because it was taught by someone who knew what that particular group of people needed. Whereas my sister had a horrible experience. It was taught as a formula-based course. Like it was a math course.”

Read the full story at LAist.