Becoming a Teacher of Statistics over Roast Beef

Michelle Everson describes her meeting with Beth Chance And Allan Rossman,

On Friday,October 1st, I met with Beth Chance and Allan Rossman. Beth and Allan were heading through Minnesota on their way to give a workshop in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. We met at Arby's in Osseo, MN, and had dinner together. Our main purpose in meeting was to talk about the "Becoming a Teacher of Statistics" course. Beth is now on sabbatical and is interested in finding out more about the course, and she'd like to be involved in some way with the course when it is taught again in the spring. We talked about this, along with a variety of other things, and it was nice to have the opportunity to hear more about what Beth and Allan are doing and to get to know them better. I always enjoy spending time with them, and I continue to learn so much from them.

Blogger's Note: There are no pictures of Allan and Beth together that come up on a Google image search, but here is a picture of a book they wrote where their names appear together. 


Note to the Blogger's Note: If the a priori null hypothesis had been that there are no images of Beth and Allan together that would come up in a Google search, this blogger would have put even money on the null being rejected at the 0.0001 significance level.

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.

Congratulations Tamara!

Tamara Moore

Tamara J. Moore (assistant professor of mathematics education, curriculum and instruction, and co-director of the STEM Education Center) has received a $400,109 Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF), to research implementing K-12 engineering standards through science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) integration.

The award is one of NSF's highest honors for early-career faculty whose research builds a firm foundation for a lifetime of integrated contributions to research and education. The grant will begin October 1, 2010, and will continue for five years.

Michelle Everson's Blog

The Catalyst for Change blog is not the only game in town. Michelle Everson has also started a blog in which she reflects and pontificates about stories and resources related to education and statistics. You can check out her musings at http://eversononline.com/.

Photos from JSM 2010

Here are some more photos of Catalysts for Change at JSM.

Bob and Rob discuss the finer points of randomization.

George provides a metaphor and Joan wishes it was about cooking. In the background Laura giggles at Danny's joke - "What do you call a tea party of more than 30 people? A z-party."

Brian tries to follow George's metaphor and Danny's joke.

Updates

Catalysts working on CATALST at JSM

Just a couple of quick updates...A couple weeks ago, Michelle Everson co-facilitated a workshop with Dave Ernst (http://www.cehd.umn.edu/ats/treks/transform.html), working with 15 faculty, staff, and graduate student instructors in the College of Education as they prepare to develop hybrid courses. Michelle says,

It's been a great opportunity for me to network with others in the college who are interested in online teaching and in using technology in their courses, and I'm definitely learning a lot about ways to improve some of our online courses. Dave and I will continue to meet with everyone and work with [these instructors] throughout the year as they put their hybrid courses together.

Also, Michelle continues to work on the video project, interviewing statistics educators whose work and writings are the underpinnings for the readings in EPsy 5271: Becoming a Teacher of Statistics. She has interviewed Allan Rossman and Beth Chance (conducting this interview when they were here for the CATALST workshop), and has been in contact with several other statistics educators about participating in this project. She hopes to begin those interviews early in the fall.


The group has been busy preparing to teach the CATALST course this Fall. The course website is up and available: http://www.tc.umn.edu/~zief0002/3264.htm. We have also reviewed and provided feedback on two instruments being used to measure students' understanding and reasoning about regression. Finally, Laura Le, a graduate student (seen in the JSM Dance Party picture in a previous post) reflects back on her very first JSM writing,

I loved it...My favorite part was was connecting with statisticians and other statistics education people. The only drawback (and it's minor) was the ovewhelming amount of talks going on at the conference. It was really hard to figure out what to go to. Although I didn't go to very many talks (Editors Note: This was our fault since we kept her quite busy in meetings for the CATALST grant.), the ones i went to were very interesting.

Catalysts at JSM

Does this picture really
need a caption?

Whew! What a trip for the Catalyst team. Michelle Everson presented an invited paper on using online discussions for a session Rob Gould organized on the effective use of instructional technology. Bob delMas was super busy participating in an invited panel that Joan organized on starting a career in statistics education, organizing a topic contributed session on collaborative research in statistics education, chairing a session on Statway—an alternative pathway to a college credit-bearing statistics course for students who place in developmental mathematics; representing the statistics education section at the Statistics Education Booth (twice!), and being made a Fellow of the American Statistics Association. Congratulations Bob!

Michael Posner, Robin Lock, 

Joan Garfield and Leigh Slausen '

are "Stayin' Alive"

Over the course of the week we made great progress on the CATALST curriculum we will be implementing this fall. Allan Rossman, Beth Chance, George Cobb and Rob Gould met with us several times during the week to brainstorm and map out the progression of learning, as well as the activities, homework and assessments that we plan on using for Units 2 and 3 of the curriculum. (We hope to post a blog entry soon laying out our current thinking on these units!)

In between sessions, section and CAUSE business meetings, and long working meetings with Allan, Beth, Rob and George, we also still managed to get in some great meals. Joan went three for three on the choice of restaurants this year. The dinner conversations were stimulating, continuing the discussions started earlier in the day. Nick Horton and Danny Kaplan also joined us several times for dinner pushing us to think even harder about the projects we were working on. Overall an A++ conference.