Stats + Stories

Fall is admissions season at universities across the United States. As colleges work to recruit a new class, a new working paper suggests that politics might impact where students decide to go to school. That’s the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories, with guest Riley Acton.

Remember the pressure of taking a test when the teacher was glaring at you, daring your eyes to roam. Cheating was not a temptation unless your were desperate and willing to risk the everpresent teacher catching you. However, the offering of online classes exploded in recent years. So what happens when you’re testing during online classes that’s the focus of this episode of Stats+Stories with guest Dr. Helaine Alessio.

COVID is still well on our minds here at Stats+Stories, mainly it’s long-term outcomes on a variety of things in our everyday lives including just how much knowledge was lost on younger generations doing class via Zoom and more. That education gap or lack thereof is the focus of this episode with guest Melissa Thomasson.

Remember the pressure of taking a test when the teacher was glaring at you, daring your eyes to roam. Cheating was not a temptation unless your were desperate and willing to risk the everpresent teacher catching you. However, the offering of online classes exploded in recent years. So what happens when you’re testing during online classes that’s the focus of this episode of Stats+Stories with guest Dr. Helaine Alessio.

Dashiell Young-Saver is a Texas based high school stats teacher. While teaching at a Title 1 school on the southside of San Antonio, Dash threw out his traditional AP Stats curriculum and created lessons on topics his students cared about: voter power, food deserts, the Spurs’s chance at winning the NBA title, online dating, and more. That year, more students at the school took and passed the AP exam than in the previous 16 years combined.  Borrowing from his class motto of “skew the script,” Young-Saver created this website and posted his lessons online for free. Now, he leads Skew The Script’s efforts to provide relevant math lessons to classrooms across the country. 

Donna LaLonde is the Associate Executive Director of the American Statistical Association (ASA) where she works with talented colleagues to advance the vision and mission of the ASA. Prior to joining the ASA in 2015, she was a faculty member at Washburn University where she enjoyed teaching and learning with colleagues and students; she also served in various administrative positions including interim chair of the Education Department and Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs. At the ASA, she supports activities associated with presidential initiatives, accreditation, education, and professional development. She also is a cohost of the Practical Significance podcast which we appeared on in May.

Steve Pierson is the Director of Science Policy for the American Statistics Association. In his role, he works to raise the profile of statistics (the scientific discipline), government statistics, and statisticians nationally. He also advocates on behalf of ASA members and for more engagement of statistics/statisticians and the need to invest in our data infrastructure, as it powers the economy and improves our health and wellbeing. 

The Consortium for the Advancement of Undergraduate Statistics Education, aka CAUSE has held the United States Conference on teaching statistics, also known as USCOTS every other year since 2005. This conference enables teachers of statistics to exchange ideas and discover how to improve their teaching. The theme of this year's conference was communicating with and about data, a topic near and dear to us on the Stats and Stories podcast. Two sub-themes are explored as part of this conference, helping students to communicate the process and results of their statistical analysis, and helping teachers to communicate with students in order to develop their understanding of statistical concepts and their ability to implement statistical methods for conversations with leaders and speakers at the United States Conference on teaching statistics were recorded on site. And we are happy to feature these in a collection of episodes of Stats and Stories with guests Kelly Spoon, Amy Hogan and Daniel Kaplan. 

In many countries in the Global South, partnerships and collaborations are crucial to moving forward projects of various kinds. A network based at the University of Colorado Boulder has facilitated the creation of statistics and data science collaboration labs in 10 countries, The LISA 2020 Global Network and it's efforts are the focus of this episode of Stats+Stories with guests Eric Vance and Olawale Awe.

University rankings are big business with highly ranked universities leveraging their ranking and marketing to prospective students, employees and funders. But the process of generating those rankings may not always be so sound that's the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories with guests Elizabeth Gadd and Adrian Barnett.

In the past, Introduction to Statistics classes spent a lot of time covering distribution tables, teaching students to run stats by hand and focusing on statistical procedures. However, educators are continually considering new ways to teach stats, and the increasing popularity of data science makes it a more urgent prospect for some. That's the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories with guest Mine Çetinkaya-Rundel.

Last academic year colleges and universities across the US struggled with whether to mandate COVID vaccinations for their students. While colleges often require vaccines, the political controversy surrounding the COVID shots made adopting a vaccine policy a complicated undertaking. But according to one study, it had a profound impact on the national COVID death toll last fall. That's the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories with guest Riley Acton.

What is a median? How about an interquartile range? Don’t even get me started on how to define a p-value. These statistical concepts are hard to grasp for your average statistics student, but imagining how these types of definitions translate into American Sign Language is a whole other ballgame. That is the focus of this episode of Stats+Stories with special guest Dr. Regina Nuzzo.

Returning guest Conner Jackson walks us through a day in the life of the education and early career of a biostatistician.

Rosemary and John both have a passion for teaching. Their experience with classes ranges from mentored studies with a few students, to face-to-face classes with close to 100 students. Recently online classes that might be held synchronously or asynchronously with classes somewhere in between. What if you wanted to offer classes too many more students, who might be based anywhere around the world. Teaching at scale is the focus of this episode of Stats+Stories with guest Kristin Sainani.

The utility of standardized testing is under debate in the US with opponents of their use in K-12 suggesting educators are now being forced to teach to tests. In higher education, there's been a push to abandon the use of standardized tests in admissions processes. But if we throw out standardized tests completely, are we throwing away a tool that still has some value? That's a question framing this episode of Stats and Stories with guest Howard Wainer.

One of the regular conversations we have at Stats and Stories is how to improve stats education, both for people who want to be statisticians, as well as for people who need to be able to understand data for their jobs or just to be able to go about their daily lives. The Consortium for the Advancement of Undergraduate Statistics Education has been working on this issue for the last 20 years. Its work is the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories with guest Dennis Pearl

The tenure track process at American universities is a grind – one shaped by the old adage to “Publish or perish.” But if a junior faculty member manages to successfully navigate the process – publishing as expected, learning to manage a classroom, participating in service – then they’re rewarded with tenure. Tenure is an almost permanent employment relationship at universities that’s designed to give faculty the freedom – because of their job security to pursue any area of inquiry they feel drawn to. The problem, of course, is that not everyone makes it through that grind. A growing body of research shows that women, though they receive more than 50-percent of all PhDs, are not making it through the tenure track process in the same numbers. That’s the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories with guests Michelle Cardel and Leslie McClure.

Where are the best locations for food pantries? What are the patterns and use of a crisis call center? How can services be improved for the senior population of Wahtenaw County in Michigan? These questions share a common denominator, they represent data and analysis needs of community service organizations. Statistics in the service of the community is the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories with guests. Emily Morris and Tom Braun.

Parents, educators, and activists have all raised concerns about the impact of COVID on the educational experience of students. For high school students, these issues are amplified as they consider graduation and what may come after. The impact of COVID on high school grades is a focus of this episode of Stats and Stories with guest Harrison Schramm.

Data science is becoming an ever more visible and important part of our lives with universities around the US, working to create or strengthen data science programs. At the same time there's a growing recognition of the need for data science outreach, particularly in order to reach underrepresented populations. Data science outreach is the focus of this episode of stats and stories with guest James Dickens.

Latoya Jennings-Lopez hosts this special episode of Stats+Stories with the children of Howard W. Bishop middle school. Listen to Alyana and Collin ask our host John Bailer and other special guest Wendy Martinez about their careers in Statistics, and how young people can get involved early. From topics such as job prospects to COVID-19’s impact, listen to what kids curious in numbers want to know.

Gail Burrill is currently an Academic Specialist in the Program for Mathematics Education at Michigan State University. She was a secondary teacher and department chair in suburban Milwaukee, Wisconsin for over 28 years. She is the Immediate Past President of the International Association for Statistical Education, served as President of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics and as Director of the Mathematical Sciences Education Board. Burrill co-chaired the College Board Commission on the Calculus Framework and is currently chair of the College Board’s Advanced Placement Calculus Development Committee.

Wendy Martinez has been serving as the Director of the Mathematical Statistics Research Center at the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) for six years. Prior to this, she served in several research positions throughout the Department of Defense. She held the position of Science and Technology Program Officer at the Office of Naval Research, where she established a research portfolio comprised of academia and industry performers developing data science products for the future Navy and Marine Corps. Wendy is also proud and grateful to have been elected as the 2020 ASA President.

Libby Pier is the Research Manager at Education Analytics, overseeing and executing EA's diverse educational research portfolio, encompassing social-emotional learning, predictive analytics, academic growth measures, human capital analytics, and program evaluation.

Nichole Webster is a research analyst at Education Analytics. She examines the item properties and performance of Social and Emotional Learning surveys and estimates teacher and school performance metrics in R. She’s part of ongoing research that examines how Item Response Theory models estimate error. She studied Mathematics and Applied Economics at the University of Wisconsin

Gerd Gigerenzer is Director of the Harding Center for Risk Literacy at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin and partner of Simply Rational - The Institute for Decisions. Gigerenzer has trained U.S. federal judges, German physicians, and top managers in decision making and understanding risks and uncertainties.