Meet Laura Ziegler!

From time to time we will put up posts that introduce you to some of the Catalysts for Change. For our inaugural post in this vein, we invite you to meet Laura Ziegler, one of the graduate students in Statistics Education at the University of Minnesota.

Laura and her husband on their wedding day.

Hello!  My name is Laura Ziegler, and I am working on a Ph.D. in Statistics Education. This is my first year at University of Minnesota, but I already have a Master's Degree in Statistics. I am currently taking 4 classes: EPSY 5221 (Principles of Educational and Psychological Measurement), EPSY 5247 (Qualitative Methods in Educational Psychology), EPSY 5243 (Principles and Methods of Evaluation), and MTHE 8571 (Research in Mathematics Education). All of my classes are very interesting and useful, in particular the math education research course. We have a group of 8 students in the class and 3 of us are not Mathematics Education majors. We have a lot of good discussions and it is interesting to see how education research is similar and/or dissimilar in different fields. One benefit of this class is that we write a research proposal. This is a good way to get feedback on a proposal to see where you can make improvements.