Just finished a stimulating, thought-provoking week at SRTL —Statistics Research Teaching and Learning conference–this year held in Two Harbors Minnesota, right on Lake Superior. SRTL gathers statistics education researchers, most of whom come with cognitive or educational psychology credentials, every two years. It’s more of a forum for thinking and collaborating than it is a platform for presenting findings, and this means there’s much lively, constructive discussion about works in progress.
The other day I was painting the trim on our house and it got me reminiscing. The year was 2005. The conference was JSM. The location was Minneapolis. I had just finished my third year of graduate school and was slotted to present in a Topic Contributed session at my first JSM. The topic was Implementing the GAISE Guidelines in College Statistics Courses. My presentation was entitled, Using GAISE to Create a Better Introductory Statistics Course.
Catalyst Press has just released the second edition of the book Statistical Thinking: A Simulation Approach to Modeling Uncertainty. The material in the book is based on work related to the NSF-funded CATALST Project (DUE-0814433). It makes exclusive use of simulation to carry out inferential analyses. The material also builds on best practices and materials developed in statistics education, research and theory from cognitive science, as well as materials and methods that are successfully achieving parallel goals in other disciplines (e.
I started off my Wednesday with the “The New Face of Statistics Education (#480)” session. Erin Blackenship from UNL talked about their second course in statistics, a math/stat course where students don’t just learn how to calculate sufficient statistics and unbiased estimators but also learn what the values they’re calculating mean in context of the data. The goal of the course is to bring together the kind of reasoning emphasized in intro stat courses with the mathematical rigor of a traditional math/stat course.
Tuesday was a slightly shorter day for me in terms of talks as I had a couple meetings to attend. The first talk I attended was my colleague Kari Lock Morgan’s talk titled “Teaching PhD Students How to Teach” (in the “Teaching Outside the Box, Ever So Slightly (# 358)” session). The talk was about a class on teaching that she took as a grad student and now teaches at Duke.
My Monday at JSM started with the “The Profession of Statistics and Its Impact on the Media (#102)” session. The first speaker in the session, Mark Hansen, was a professor of mine at UCLA, so it was nice to see a familiar face (or more like hear a familiar voice - the room was so jam packed that I couldn’t really “see” him) and catch up on what he has been working on at his new position at Columbia University as a Professor of Journalism and the Director of David and Helen Gurley Brown Institute for Media Innovation.
Bonjour de Montréal!
I’m at JSM 2013, and thought it might be nice to give a brief summary of highlights of each day. Given the size of the event, any session that I attend means I’m missing at least ten others. So this is in no way an exhaustive overview of the day at the conference, more tidbits from my day here. I’ll make a public commitment to post daily throughout the conference, hoping that the guilt of not living up to my promise helps me not lose steam after a couple days.
