Catalysts for Change Published in SERJ!

The Statistics Education Research Journal (SERJ) has published the paper, Publishing in SERJ: An Analysis of Papers from 2002–2009. The paper was written by Catalysts for Change Andrew Zieffler, Joan Garfield, Robert DelMas, Laura Le, Rebekah Isaak, Audbjorg Bjornsdottir and Jiyoon Park. [Access the paper here.]

Abstract:

SERJ has provided a high quality professional publication venue for researchers in statistics education for close to a decade. This paper presents a review of the articles published to explore what they suggest about the field of statistics education, the researchers, the questions addressed, and the growing knowledge base on teaching and learning statistics. We present a detailed analysis of these articles in order to address the following questions: What is being published and why, who is publishing research in SERJ, how is the research being carried out, and what do the results suggest about future research?

Andrew Zieffler at the Deming Conference and University of Maryland!

On December 2, Andrew Zieffler will visit the University of Maryland and he will be presenting at the EDMS Measurement & Statistics Monday Symposia (MSMS). His talk will highlight a few of the computational tools, techniques and standards that research methodologists and data analysts would be well served to be familiar with including LaTeX, Sweave, XML, SQL, regular expressions, and data visualization tools. [Abstract for Andrew's talk.]

Dr. Andrew Zieffler and his old friends.

Andrew Zieffler's next presentation will be together with Jeffrey Harring at The 67th Deming Conference on Applied Statistics. They will do a workshop on randomization and bootstrap methods for making group comparisons. 

Topics of the workshop:

- Exploratory Data Analysis using Kernel Density Plots

- Randomization and Bootstrap tests

- Effect Sizes and Bootstrap Intervals

[More information about the workshop here.]

CATALST's colleagues update!

A great article about a fellow Catalyst for Change, Chris Franklin was posted on Columns (The Online Newspaper For The University of Georgia Community)!

The article can be seen at:
http://columns.uga.edu/news/fulltext/prof-helps-students-use-data/


Robert Gould has a newly published book: "INTRODUCTORY STATISTICS -  Exploring the World through Data."

Book details on http://www.pearsonhighered.com/gould1einfo/index.html

Statistics Education Seminar presented by Xiao-Li Meng!

Xiao-Li Meng (Department of Statistics, Harvard University) gave a talk last Friday, October 28, at the QME Colloquia Series at the University of Minnesota.

Professor Meng and his "Happy Team" on the opening day of Stat 105.
Cassandra Wolos, Kari Lock, Xiao-Li Meng, Yves Chretien, and Paul Edlefsen.
Photo by Rose Lincoln/Harvard News Office.

Title: Statistical Education and Educating Statisticians: Producing Wine Connoisseurs and Master Winemakers

Abstract: The distinction between statistical education and educating statisticians is of particular importance at the pre-graduate school level. In recent years we have taken a broader view of statistical education for Harvard’s undergraduates, by shifting the focus  from preparing a few to pursue Ph.D. level quantitative studies to helping many  gain a basic appreciation of statistical argument and insight,  as a part of their liberal arts critical thinking training and experience.  Intriguingly, the journey, guided by the philosophy that one can become a wine connoisseur without ever knowing how to make wine, apparently has led us to produce many more future winemakers than when we focused only on producing a vintage.  At the Ph.D. level, our focus has always been to produce the best winemakers, to take the wine analogy further, but true expert winemakers need to master far more than merely the chemical process of fermenting juice into alcohol, especially with ever increasing competition and demand.  We therefore introduced a Professional Development Curriculum (PDC) parallel to the usual course curriculum, starting  from “Stat 303: The Art and Practice of Teaching Statistics,” a required one-year course for all entering Ph.D.s, aiming at both producing well trained teaching fellows for undergraduate courses and effective statistical communicators in general.  This talk shares a number of stories from our intoxicating journey and experiments, including a Riesling randomized trial conducted for Stat 105: Real-Life Statistics: Your Chance for Happiness (or Misery) to assess the single most influential  factor in students’ ability to judge wine quality (once they are over 21).

Read more at http://www.stat.harvard.edu/Academics/invitation_chair_txt.html

Catalysts for Change to Host SRTL-8 in 2013!

The International Research Forum on Statistical Reasoning, Thinking, and Literacy 2011 (SRTL-7) included SEVEN members of the CATALST Team! Joan, Bob, Andy, Rob, Herle, Jen and Aaron. The next SRTL (2013) will be hosted by the CATALST team here in Minnesota!  

Statistics Education educators and researchers playing in the sand.

SRTL-7 was described shortly in IASE Matters:

From 17 to 23 July 2011, the seventh biennial Forum of the International Collaboration for Research on Statistical Reasoning, Thinking and Literacy (SRTL-7) took place on Texel Island in The Netherlands. The Freudenthal Institute for Science and Mathematics Education of the Utrecht University hosted this SRTL-7. During the Forum, a small group of worldwide Statistics Education educators and researchers presented and discussed research on the theme: “New approaches to developing reasoning about samples and sampling in informal statistical inference”.

The Forum was structured with long presentations (90 min.), short presentations (30 min.), and whole and small group discussions, organized by thematic clusters focusing on Primary school, Middle school, Secondary education, Tertiary education, and Teacher education.

Inspired and exhausted by the intensive scientific and social programs, the participants went home full of new ideas. Like in previous SRTL forums, joint publications (an edited book and a journal special issue) are planned to publish the results of SRTL-7.

For more information, visit www.srtl.info.

CATALST at the Mathematical Association of America (MAA)!

Last Saturday, October 22nd, Jim Albert gave a contributed talk "Teaching Statistical Thinking" at the Fall Meeting of the Mathematical Association of America (MAA), Ohio Section, at the University of Findlay.

My talk gave a general motivation and introduction to the CATALST program, brief descriptions of a few of the MEA's, and some comments on my experience using the curriculum.

Some slides from Jim's talk!

The abstract of Jim's paper and all the other activities for the Fall Meeting of the Mathematical Association of America, Ohio Section, can be viewed at: http://sections.maa.org/ohio/Programs/ProgramFall2011.pdf

Next challenge: CATALST ONLINE! ... by Michelle Everson

This semester, I have been sitting in on the CATALST course in order to determine how to best create an online version of this course. I will teach one of the first completely online CATALST courses in the spring of 2012, and I’m very excited about it!

Two of our other CATALST implementers—Sabrina Ripp (from Tulsa Community College) and Terri Pigott (from Loyola University Chicago)—will also be teaching a fully online CATALST course in the spring. On a regular basis, Sabrina, Terri, and I—along with Rebekah Isaak—have conference calls via Skype to plan for the online course. Although we all teach on the semester system, we’ve discovered that we do not all use the same classroom management systems (two of us will likely use Blackboard and one will use Moodle), nor will we be designing our courses for the same audiences. Sabrina will be working with students who attend a two-year college, I will be working with upper-level undergraduate students at a four-year university, and Terri will be teaching graduate students (some of whom may not even be in the country). It will be interesting, therefore, to compare our courses once they are underway in order to determine if the ways we have chosen to structure the online learning environment will work effectively in different settings, with different types of students.

Picture from  http://accessdl.state.al.u

So far, our discussions have focused mostly on the assignments and activities that are a part of Unit 1. We are trying to determine how we can best orient our students to the online environment and make sure they begin working on the course as soon as the semester begins. We are also thinking about how to best implement discussion activities in the online environment. A great thing about the classroom-version of the CATALST course is that there is always a lot of rich discussion and activity going on. We would like—as best as possible—to replicate this in the online environment, but we’re not quite sure yet how to do this. Ideally, we’d like for the students to be able to engage in some synchronous discussion and even share computer screens as they work through activities that involve using Tinkerplots, but we need to figure out what kind of software will allow us to easily do this and how to handle the kind of technical problems that tend to arise when such tools are used in online courses. We have talked about possibly using tools like Wimba or Adobe Connect for some synchronous discussion. Another thing we have frequently discussed is just how many assignments we should be collecting from students each week, and when we should collect these assignments. The online course can be more reading and writing for students than a typical classroom-based course, and we want to make sure the workload is manageable for our students.

Sabrina was able to visit us recently and see the CATALST course in action, and Terri is now planning to visit us in late November. We will keep you updated on our progress!