Statistics
2022–2023
Xiang Meng
My work with the pedagogy course included practice teaching and concept discussions. While students appreciated practice teaching more, concept discussions were also useful. Student surveys showed improvement in visual aids use, pacing, and confidence. I conducted the survey on why teaching matters in statistics to motivate G1s and help G2+ and faculty reflect on their values. The results showed that teaching has taught people communication, humility, insight, and statistics. As teachers, participants in the survey said that they learned to aim for deep understanding and see statistics ideas from many perspectives. Teaching is important to help students become statistically well-educated citizens.
2021–2022
Louis Cammarata
As the 2021-2022 Statistics Pedagogy Fellow, I focused on designing and teaching the syllabus of the department’s pedagogy course, STAT 303 (The Art and Practice of Teaching and Communicating Statistics) based on four main components: learning, observing, practicing, and reflecting. I placed a strong emphasis on oral teaching and communication skills, by integrating 6 in-class oral presentations in the curriculum. STAT 303 is a unique time for incoming Statistics PhD students to practice teaching; I believe that giving them multiple microteaching opportunities will improve their confidence and impact when they face students in their second year.
2019–2020
Nicole Pashley & Sanqian Zhang
This year, we made changes to the pedagogy class in the Department of Statistics based on three themes: 1) Teaching in statistics in a big data world, in which we added themes to microteaching sessions to address the need of teaching coding and communicating with different audiences. 2) Integrating resources, in which we brought in pedagogy content from various sources. 3) Adapting to remote teaching, in which we modified classroom activities into offline assignments to allow for more flexibility in the online learning environment. We believe these changes updated the course in meaningful and relevant ways.