Dr. Dennis Pearl is a Professor of Statistics at Pennsylvania State University and Director of the Consortium for the Advancement of Undergraduate Statistics Education (CAUSE). Dr. Pearl's education work centers on building a national infrastructure to support instructors of statistics, developing resources for instructors in both statistics and probability education, and developing and testing new pedagogical methods.
Episode Description
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
+Full Transcript
Rosemary Pennington
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 where we explore the statistics behind the stories. And the stories behind the statistics. I'm Rosemary Pennington. Stats and Stories is a production of Miami University's departments of Statistics and Media, Journalism and Film, as well as the American Statistical Association. Joining me is regular panelist John Bailer Chair of Miami Statistics department. Our guest today is Dennis Pearl. Pearl is professor of statistics at Pennsylvania State University and director of the Consortium for the advancement of undergraduate Statistics Education. Pearl’s education work centers on building a national infrastructure to support stats instructors, developing resources for instructors in both statistics and probability education, and developing and testing new pedagogical methods. Dennis, thank you so much for joining us today.
Dennis Pearl And thanks so much for having me, this is going to be fun.
Rosemary Pennington I wondered if you could just get started explaining how statistics education became a focus for you.
Dennis Pearl
Well, it kind of became a focus as a grad student, I guess you'd say when I was teaching at University of California, Berkeley with Freedman Pisani and Purvis were writing their book and I was a TA for them. And, and they really brought to the fore sort of the ideas of how you can explain statistical concepts without formulas and teach it for an arts and humanities group. And the fact that that is really a deep course not not something to be taken lightly. And that sort of got me interested in pedagogy and teaching, teaching, a subject that most students feel is, is is another math class. And it really isn't.
John Bailer
You know, to continue on this theme of origin stories, then, can you talk a little bit about how that interest evolved and ultimately emerged with a passion as part of the cause?
Dennis Pearl
Well, I was always kind of interested in resources and teaching statistics, you know, I had developed a number of technological resources, the project I worked on in the 1980s and 90s, with Bill Knotts and Elizabeth stagnated at Ohio State when we were developing the electronic Encyclopedia of statistics examples and exercises are easy and working with Paul velopment, who was also insightful enough to say, hey, we need to put this on the web. And he sort of created a project called dazzle data and story library that he that he put up, that was sort of the easy stories that we had done, easy, easy had all these component parts, we, we would have the background on the on the kind of real example we would have the protocol that was used for collecting the data, we would have a number of questions and guidance for instructors and so forth, and, and we put all that stuff together, and then those days was HyperCard, on the on the max and things like that. And so we're all kind of interested in supplying resources to people. And, and then, you know, that kind of just grew on me that we wanted to, to set up something that we know people teach, but don't have the time to develop these kinds of things. You know, I'm sort of privileged being a university professor with the type of class loads that allows you time for research and you know, after you get tenure and so forth, you have the ability to do these kinds of things. And you know, that together with meeting people from the statistics education community really took things off for for me when I sort of bridge my knowledge of statistics and my interest in providing technological resources for for teaching and, and meeting people like John Garfield and George Cobb and, and all these people that this field has been based on.
John Bailer
Just as a quick follow up, you know, it's it's fun to hear you mentioned, like the dazzle library, the data and stories library, I remember as an early in, early in my career as an instructor, you know, thinking that that I had been given a gift from the gods when I was when I found this, because, you know, so rosemary, this was a really cool resource that there were, it was topical. So it could have different application areas, but it was also methodological. So you could say, well, I want to find This example that uses regression and you know, I don't know, in geology, and then you could, and then it would say, here's some of the tools and techniques. And so you could find these really neat, neat examples and resources. And, I thought that was such a tremendous gift to the community to have this resource available for instructors, and for students to kind of think about how they might use it in areas of interest. And it seems like that's something that cause has embraced and, and promoted throughout its existence. Does that ring true?
Dennis Pearl
Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, the whole thing is, is the idea of providing infrastructure, both resources, professional development opportunities, connections of people, to people with, through conferences, both electronic and in person, and all those kinds of things that allow you to develop a community rather than just have a bunch of people reinventing the wheel everywhere, which, which is not a good model. And education just is not very efficient in that regard. With people reinventing things in, you know, in 100 different places all over the country and sharing very little, you know, there's not an attitude of volunteering and sharing that people want to, but it doesn't get shared. In other words, it doesn't really happen unless, unless you have these sort of central places to look to and so forth.
Rosemary Pennington
Could you talk about how cars got started? And I'm looking at the list of institutional members, and it's, you know, quite a number of universities that are associated with cost. So could you talk about how I got started, and maybe sort of what the expectations are? If you sign on to become a cause member? Are you sharing resources? Are you sharing? So like, how does that work? If you're part of this,
Dennis Pearl
This was started a little more than 20 years ago, when we were first having these organizational meetings. Deb Rumsey and John Garfield initially got a memory Initiative Grant, I forgot what they were called, in those days from AASA to organize some sort of a web portal for statistics, I Jackie Dietz, who had just come off of being the editor of the Journal of statistics, education was going to be the editor of this and Deb was going to be the director of the organization. And then things sort of changed a little bit, Deb was having her first child or and Jackie was unable to be the editor. And so I got turned to I, I ended up being the director and so that sort of became where I got involved. And where it took off was that the NSF was having a national NSDL National Science digital library, I think it was a competition for people to provide in different disciplines. And so we'd sort of put in an application to be the NSDL library for statistics, and statistics, education research, I wrote that grant with Raj Woodard and who was at Ohio State at the time and so, so we got that grant, which allowed us to sort of build the website, cause web.org. And, and then so that once that started then the next thing was, we want to hold conferences, Deb Rumsey was took the lead on developing the Ascot series of con conferences, which happens every other year and odd numbered years, the US Conference on teaching statistics, and her and I wrote a grant for getting a we call it Cosmos grant and came with Tom short, Tom and I wrote a grant called the causeway grant the which developed workshops. And so we had the website, this conference series, the workshops, we developed a program for faculty communities, and then the memberships came about. That's what you were talking about the institutional memberships in about 2006. Dick Schaefer was on our board of directors and said, you know, this organization really needs a charter and we need some way to sort of make it a permanent, a permanent thing. And, and with dicks guidance, we develop the system of institutional members where the institution say, Well, yeah, we support the mission of cause. And we will support people in our department who work on statistics education. It was extremely important to us that that faculty gets supported by their departments that being in statistical education is not something that hurts their tenure prospects but enhances them. And so we wanted to get departments to sign on to that kind of statement. So joining causes an institution member is free, but the institution has to be committed to supporting the mission and signing off a Memorandum of Understanding saying that They do. And so that was, that was the number one thing that we wanted to have happen.
John Bailer
So, you know, we talked about some of the standard things that one might expect in an organization like this, the idea of having, you know, conferences or training or other kinds of, you know, touchstones of what we could expect or how to promote research in STEM education. I'd like to just change gears a little bit to talk about something that you have that I don't think many others have. And that is a fun collection of tools and resources for this. I mean, I know Rosemary is going why funding statistics, this doesn't make you know, this runs completely counter to my interactions with John, you know, but but
Rosemary Pennington
I know a lot about puns and statistics because of working with you.
John Bailer
Hey, you know, and that actually ties into the caption contest for the cartoons that they run each month. That's very much so. So can you talk a little bit about, you know, the fact that you that, that cause sponsors this idea of a fun collection? What are some of the things that show up there, and you know, maybe help us dive in a little bit, some of some aspects of these.
Dennis Pearl
So, the fun collection is something that I do with Larry Lesser from University of Texas, El Paso, we have a collection of about 1000 items now and growing. It would grow faster if I had the time to go in and enter them. Darn it. But you know, about a quarter of the collection are cartoons, another quarter of the collection is songs and videos. And another quarter the collection is quotes are quote collections, we make a really strong effort to be sure that we have quotes by women, which isn't usually happening, especially in the STEM disciplines. So normal collections usually see about 5% of the quotes coming from women and we have a rule that the minimum in the collection could be 30%. And, new items have to be at least at a 50% ratio. So we have a more diverse collection, then most people would have in terms of quotes. So that's one kind of thing. So those are the three big items. And then we have poems, we have artwork, we have short stories, we have magic tricks, we have puzzles, we have a variety of other kinds of things that in games, things that are sort of in that, in that fun style, Larry, and I maintain the collection, we have the items we have teaching notes that go with it, and all the resources are free, all of them are, are okay to use in the class. Many of the items that require royalty payments for commercial entities to use them, that just for your own teaching, and so forth, every single item in there has been pre approved pre you know, we've always all the authors have given us permission to use them in the classroom. And so we're really proud of the collection overall. And then, Larry and I also write a series of articles for the journal teaching statistics and international journal that covers sort of K through 12, as well as the intro course. So it's sort of K through 19, I guess they sort of say, and so that's what the journal publishes three times a year. So each issue of the journal we provide another column on how to use fun in teaching for particular topics. So we've covered the census, we've covered sampling, we've covered regression, we've covered correlation, we've covered hypothesis testing, we've covered probability, we've covered sampling, we've covered Simpson's paradox, we're working on statistical summaries, and then measurement and so forth. And, those columns give our best teaching guidance overall, because there we specify, here's all the learning objectives. Here's stuff you could use to teach those learning objectives. Here's a brief suggestion for how to do it. And then once in a while, we'll put up some extra supplementary materials along with those two.
Rosemary Pennington
You're listening to Stats and Stories. And today we're talking to Dennis Pearl of Penn State about statistics, education and the cause web. You mentioned music. And so I have a Music Education major child. And I'm curious if you could talk about this voice program that I was kind of digging around on your website looking at and explain what that is and how it is used to teach stats.
Dennis Pearl
Yeah, I mean, so we do use music and teaching statistics. We've done some experiments to show its efficacy. We had a nice experiment with an NSF grant the uplift project where we put items on the web so that a student would be randomized as to whether they saw the song as the thing that they were learning the car content from or whether they saw a sort of written expository thing with maybe maybe a graphic in it or something like that, of course, this is all, no more than five minutes write a song is like a typically three minute thing so and then we would have assessment items on the final or midterms covering those same learning objectives that the song was about. And we found that this group learning through the song did about 7% better on those items. So you're talking half a letter grade, overall, some songs did better than others, and of the best one did 13% better. And the worst one did maybe minus 1%, worse or something, but there were about seven songs studied, and they just did better. And so then we went on from there to do some other work and in songs and finally got into an interdisciplinary group that 's called Voices, virtual ongoing interactions with, you know, colleagues and other fields. And we've seen that this is a popular way to learn, you know, people kind of think of it as just something for, for kindergarten or something, but it really at the college level can really help teach some good conceptual items.
Rosemary Pennington
I want to see John singing at the front of the classroom and trying to explain a statistical formula through song.
John Bailer
You know it Rosemary, and I want to see you do interpretive dance to teach intro journalism. That's okay.
Dennis Pearl
We have dance there as one of our categories.
John Bailer
Actually, I was looking at the dancing frequency distribution before we started this galls.
Dennis Pearl
Yeah, it's amazing. I mean, there's a lot of clever people around the world, right? I mean, and so to see that product, I think that it was out of England, where she has this dance group that she likes to illustrate variation. You can have some group of dancers, where they're sort of doing the same movements over and over and over others that do much more varied movements. And then you're trying to comment on well, what's the difference between how these people are moving and how these people are moving. And you know, to illustrate variation, it's a really nice, really nice technique. And she has four videos in our collection, one on correlation, one on variation, one on location, I can't remember the fourth one right now. But the point is, is that she's got them and she's written These lesson plans, and where else are you going to find those on this? You know, or don't even look for them? Unless you have a collection like ours?
John Bailer
So now you're absolutely right. I mean, I love these categories. And by the way, Rosemary, my, my grandfather, when he was in elementary school, the choir teacher said that if he would just stay in there and be quiet, he would get a C, but if he kept singing, he would fail. And I think I may have my grandfather's voice, so that that probably is not,
Dennis Pearl
that would be exactly what would happen with me and my voice. So. So that is a pretty crucial point in addressing what Rosemary pointed out. And that is that we wanted to do this so that it would be for everybody, not for just those that have the talent to go forward and, and are enough of an extrovert to, you know, play the guitar, for their class, and so forth. So all of our songs have recordings, we have a commercial music program at University of Texas, El Paso, they will record any of the songs that we ask them to for inexpensively gives the students there, some credits that we pay them, but also, you know, there they've done something that's, that's being used by a national organization. And then we also have lots of songs that are actually written by professionals and people that do this kind of thing for a living and are willing to share for classroom use.
John Bailer
So just as a follow up, I mean, I've enjoyed the aspects of seeing the magic trick with Mark Mark Glickman doing some things that were really very clever. I mean, I thought it was really neat of introducing probability ideas through some of those demonstrations. That was very nice. The cartoons are fun to where you have a contest that's engaging the larger public, where people will write captions to try to have a learning outcome that's associated with statistics. as they as they build these captions, I would like to ask just just to give us an example of, you know, if you were teaching a class on some topic, you know, how you might integrate, whether it's a song snippet, or a cartoon caption, or, you know, some of these other components or quotes or poems or others, how do you bring that in and kind of integrate that into how you do your, your instruction?
Dennis Pearl
I usually have cartoons at the beginning of a lecture period. And then I introduce a topic by saying, you know, we're going to talk about this, you know, and then sort of reference the reference the job they've just seen, you know, maybe the cartoon with Thomas Jefferson saying that he wrote the Declaration of Independence because he was afraid of conditional probability that and then, you know, say that this is what we're going to talk about today that so that kind of a thing would be sort of like the intro of a lecture kind of a usage and you know, it's It's up there on the screen while I'm preparing my technology in front of the room and so forth. Another use might be in a homework assignment, for example, the song I wrote an old time random poll that's going as a, along with the music of all time, rock and roll. And, you know, we had that song by one of these UTEP students, you know, a really terrific song. And it covers areas of polling that people don't usually cover in an intro class, like how low response rates require waiting for samples. And that's kind of a, an important topic that isn't usually covered very much in, in intro statistics classes, and we do it. I'll have a lab assignment where students search for polls, on the internet or in the media, and then we and then they're discussed in the lab. And then we'll have sort of four main polls that are selected from the ones students picked, and then we'll discuss those. And we'll bring out specific points right in those discussions in lab, and then the assignment here is, Okay, listen to the song, look at the lyrics tell me what part of these lyrics go along with the real examples we discussed in lab so that they have to make the transfer from a concept in one context to a concept in another context. And so that's a, you know, a really nice assignment, students enjoy listening to the song, and, and so forth. And so that would be another way. In that series of articles I mentioned that Larry and I do for teaching statistics, we also tend to blend the fine items with other things like integrated as part of one lesson, listen to the song, play this. And then also use this app on the, on the web to study this concept that was discussed and in that song, or in the joke or whatever, whatever fun items we're doing. So we like to pair these things. Very good.
John Bailer
I’m glad to hear that you're getting all these columns and teaching statistics. My, my former isI colleague, Helen MacGillivray was the ISI president that I been on the executive committee with and so she does, she does great work.
Dennis Pearl
Yeah, and I love the fact it challenges me when we have to do it for an international audience. Yeah, it's not just it's not just spelling things, Oh, you are instead of or at the end, it's, it's, you know, it's like, the type of examples you use, does this word mean the same thing in Africa as it does in the United States or England and so forth. And, and that takes a lot of careful thought when we're doing those things.
John Bailer
So, you know, the thing I wanted to follow up with, you've done all this stuff with cause web and the impact is, it's outstanding, so congratulations on this, this incredibly important contribution. I was thinking about my friend and colleague here, Rosemary and her department, they have methods classes, too. And it's true throughout universities. And as you well know, you know, statistics is rarely taught only in the stat department or in a math department. So this cause has some kind of impact, has grown, has found a home and some of these other methods, classes and other departments.
Dennis Pearl
I think so I mean, clearly the main group that's sort of LinkedIn with the organization gets LinkedIn via being members of other organizations and tends to see our stuff there. But there altogether is about 20,000 instructors in the United States that teach undergraduate statistics, or undergraduate statistics courses, like AP classes, and our E News list goes out to 5000 of them. So we're looking at, at somehow reaching about a quarter of the total, now conditional on whether they're in the social sciences versus, versus in the statistics, or data science programs nowadays. I mean, obviously, we don't do as well in those groups. But it is something that we try to reach out for a little bit.
John Bailer
So I gotta ask a quick follow up that you just said something that Rosemary is giving me that it's not. It's not a status of stories recording if I don't get at least one glare from rosemary. So now the question is, you know, where do data science songs come into this or the fun part of this with cause that's going to hit some data science topics?
Dennis Pearl
Yeah, well, I mean, obviously, those are newer and, and coming along, coming along. Now we do have a few in the collection. And again, I visit the types of things where, okay, I got to add these things into the collection that that are building up in the inbox, because a lot of the new ones follow that line now, in terms of quotes, that is exactly where a lot of the new quotes are coming up, especially when I when I work to add quotes From female authors, I am going to search a lot of the new female data sciences scientists. And that's sort of where, how that's happening.
Rosemary Pennington
Well, that's all the time we have for this episode of Stats and Stories. Dennis, thank you so much for joining us today.
Dennis Pearl And thank you.
Rosemary Pennington Stats and Stories is a partnership between Miami University’s Departments of Statistics, and Media, Journalism and Film, and the American Statistical Association. You can follow us on Twitter, Apple podcasts, or other places you can find podcasts. If you’d like to share your thoughts on the program send your email to statsandstories@miamioh.edu or check us out at statsandstories.net, and be sure to listen for future editions of Stats and Stories, where we discuss the statistics behind the stories and the stories behind the statistics.