This is a nice article that talks about students' impediments in learning statistics. The article gives a laundry list of recommendations to improve the state of statistical pedagogy at college-level courses.

The basic goals for any instructor should be to impart the following ideas:

  1. The idea of variability of data and summary statistics.

  2. Normal distributions are useful models though they are seldom perfect fits.

  3. The usefulness of sample characteristics (and inference made using these measures) depends critically on how sampling is conducted.

  4. A correlation between two variables does not imply cause and effect.

  5. Statistics can prove very little conclusively although they may suggest things, and therefore statistical conclusions should not be blindly accepted.

The paper reports findings from Psychological research, Statistical education research and Mathematical education research. Subsequently it gives a list of general principles of learning statistics for a college-grad.