Meet Rebekah Isaak!

Rebekah tries out a new hairstyle at the Renaissance Festival

Greetings! My name is Rebekah Isaak and I am a second year Ph.D. student in Statistics Education at the University of Minnesota. I have my Bachelor of Science in Mathematics from Drexel University. This fall, I am taking three courses in the Department of Educational Psychology: EPSY 8264 (Advanced Multiple Regression), EPSY 5247 (Qualitative Research Methods), and EPSY 5244 (Survey Design). All three courses are practical and fascinating, but Survey Design is currently the most applicable to my research interests. 

As a project for the Survey Design course, I am designing and piloting a survey to measure mathematics, computation, and statistics instructors’ perceived value of online presentations, called M-CASTs, to their own teaching after viewing them. As a piece of the NSF-funded Project MOSIAC, these presentations are designed to “improve undergraduate STEM education by better integrating Modeling, Statistics, Computation, and Calculus" and to "provide a quick and easy way for educators to share ideas, get reactions from others, and form collaborations". I plan to use the data gathered to identify M-CASTs that seem to be of pedagogical value. Extensions of this work might use M-CASTs of perceived value as examples in order to identify the characteristics of M-CASTs that contribute to “effectiveness” in the teaching of the concepts they cover.