Andrew Zieffler

• PhD
• Senior Lecture at University of Minnesota

As ideas from data science become more prevalent in secondary curricula, it is important to understand secondary teachers’ content knowledge and reasoning about complex data structures and modern visualizations. The purpose of this case study is to explore how secondary teachers make sense of mappings between data and visualizations, especially dep...

One of the most important goals in a statistics class is to develop students who are statistically literate and can reason with statistical concepts. The REALI instrument was designed to concurrently assess statistical literacy and reasoning in introductory statistics students. This paper reports a measurement analysis of the statistical literacy a...

Women have been enrolling in and graduating from postsecondary institutions at higher rates than men for decades. The current study advances previous work by taking an intersectional approach to researching the relationships between gender, family income, and prior family postsecondary experiences. We conducted an archival, longitudinal study using...

Introduction to Data Science (IDS) courses are being offered by many different departments either as a mandatory or an elective course. Because of the foundational nature of IDS courses to develop students’ understanding of data science, it is important to be aware of students’ potential learning difficulties. To that end, we conducted semi-structu...

Our complex world requires multivariate reasoning to make sense of reality. Within this paper, we offer a sequence of activities designed to develop multivariate reasoning by explicitly connecting data and visualization. The activities were designed based on a hypothetical learning trajectory we conjectured for students with limited experience with...

The influx of data and the advances in computing have led to calls to update the introductory statistics curriculum to better meet the needs of the contemporary workforce. To this end, we developed the COMputational Practices in Undergraduate TEaching of Statistics (COMPUTES) instrument, which can be used to measure the extent to which computation...

While coursework provides undergraduate data science students with some relevant analytic skills, many are not given the rich experiences with data and computing they need to be successful in the workplace. Additionally, students often have limited exposure to team-based data science and the principles and tools of collaboration that are encountere...

Importance: Insufficient voluntary forearm movements are associated with ineffective and inefficient functional performance among people poststroke. Although evidence supports the application of the occupational therapy task-oriented (OTTO) approach for this population, the training protocol does not explicitly address the role of forearm rotation...

While coursework introduces undergraduate data science students to some relevant analytic skills, many are not given the myriad experiences with data and computing they need to be successful in the workplace. Additionally, students often have little background with team-based data science and the principles and tools of collaboration that are encou...

Statistical modeling continues to gain prominence in the secondary curriculum, and recent recommendations to emphasize data science and computational thinking may soon position algorithmic models into the school curriculum. Many teachers’ preparation for and experiences teaching statistical modeling have focused on probabilistic models. Subsequentl...

We strongly believe that real-world training and experiences cannot be reserved just for graduate students. The same primary argument made by Kolaczyk et al. (2021)—that graduate students need a richer understanding of the interplay of theory and practice than we have historically offered—also applies to undergraduate students. Not including these...

Statistical literacy and statistical reasoning are important learning goals that instructors aim to develop in statistics students. However, there is a lack of clarity regarding the relationship among these learning goals and to what extent they overlap. The REasoning and Literacy Instrument (REALI) was designed to concurrently measure statistical...

Statistical modeling is a core component of statistical thinking and has been identified by several countries as a curricular goal for secondary education. However, many secondary teachers have minimal preparation for teaching this topic. The goal of this research study is to learn about teachers’ perceptions of the role statistical models play in...

Statistics education is an interdisciplinary field that is focused on the teaching and learning of statistics. This chapter describes how the discipline of statistics education has emerged and evolved from the training of statistics practitioners to the education of students at all levels and from a practice rooted in mathematics and science to a s...

Multiple reports highlight the increasingly quantitative nature of biological research and the need to innovate means to ensure that students acquire quantitative skills. We present a tool to support such innovation. The Biological Science Quantitative Reasoning Exam (BioSQuaRE) is an assessment instrument designed to measure the quantitative skill...

Graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) are responsible for the instruction of many statistics courses offered at the university level, yet little is known about these students' preparation for teaching, their beliefs about how introductory statistics should be taught, or the pedagogical practices of the courses they teach. An online survey to examine...

Research in statistics education and measurement suggest the use of quality instruments with good psychometric characteristics to measure students’ learning outcomes. However, very few quality instruments have been developed, evaluated, and are available to researchers to measure students’ statistical knowledge. This paper reports the development o...

The test instrument GOALS-2 was designed primarily to evaluate the effectiveness of the CATALST curriculum. The purpose of this study was to perform a psychometric analysis of this instrument. Undergraduate students from six universities in the United States (n=289) were administered the instrument. Three measurement models were fit and compared: t...

This chapter describes the development of students’ thinking as they experienced an innovative introductory statistics curriculum that replaced traditional content and methods with an approach based on simulation and resampling. The methods employed in the curriculum were based on a framework for inference that had students specify a chance model,...

This paper describes the importance of developing students’ reasoning about samples and sampling variability as a foundation for statistical thinking. Research on expert–novice thinking as well as statistical thinking is reviewed and compared. A case is made that statistical thinking is a type of expert thinking, and as such, research comparing nov...

The book is available online at: https://zief0002.github.io/statistical-thinking/ The data sets and other resouces can be downloaded from: https://github.com/zief0002/Statistical-Thinking

While models are an important concept in statistics, few introductory statistics courses at the tertiary level put models at the core of the curriculum. This paper reports on a radically different approach to teaching statistics at the tertiary level, one that uses models and simulation as the organizing theme of the course. The focus on modeling a...

This study examined students' development of reasoning about quantitative bivariate data during a one-semester university-level introductory statistics course. There were three research questions of interest: (1) What is the nature, or pattern of change in students' development in reasoning throughout the course?; (2) Is the sequencing of quantitat...

This paper reports on an instrument designed to assess the practices and beliefs of instructors of introductory statistics courses across the disciplines. Funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation, this project developed, piloted, and gathered validity evidence for the Statistics Teaching Inventory (STI). The instrument consists of...

This paper reports on an instrument designed to assess the practices and beliefs of instructors of introductory statistics courses across the disciplines. Funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation, this project developed, piloted, and gathered validity evidence for the Statistics Teaching Inventory (STI). The instrument consists of...

Supplementary figures. Figure S1. Paid media, earned media, and service volumes included in statistical models, July 2005 - June 2006. Figure S2. Paid media, earned media, and service volume included in statistical models, July 2006 - June 2007. Figure S3. Paid media, earned media, and service volumes included in statistical models, July 2007 - Jun...

This observational study assessed the relation between mass media campaigns and service volume for a statewide tobacco cessation quitline and stand-alone web-based cessation program. Multivariate regression analysis was used to identify how weekly calls to a cessation quitline and weekly registrations to a web-based cessation program are related to...

To control order effects in questionnaires containing paired comparisons, Ross (1934) described an optimal ordering of the pairings. The pairs can also be balanced so that every stimulus appears equal numbers of times as the first and the second member of a pair. First, we describe and illustrate the optimally spaced, balanced ordering of pairings....

SERJ has provided a high quality professional publication venue for researchers in statistics education for close to a decade. This paper presents a review of the articles published to explore what they suggest about the field of statistics education, the researchers, the questions addressed, and the growing knowledge base on teaching and learn...

The authors present a precursor version of inference and then develop some specific and highly visual methods. These build on novel ways of experiencing sampling variation and are intuitive related to the standard formal methods of making inferences in introductory courses at university. The proposal uses visual comparisons to enable the inferentia...

Although much attention has been paid to issues around student assessment, for most introductory statistics courses few changes have taken place in the ways students are assessed. The assessment literature describes three foundational elements—cognition, observation, and interpretation—that comprise an “assessment triangle” underlying all assessmen...

This chapter illustrates the method of designing and creating an assessment plan that supports learning and that is aligned with the aforementioned goals laid out by the statistics education community. It provides working definitions of the learning outcomes that appear to be valued by the statistics education community, namely, statistical literac...

Informal inferential reasoning is a relatively recent concept in the research literature. Several research studies have defined this type of cognitive process in slightly different ways. In this paper, a working definition of informal inferential reasoning based on an analysis of the key aspects of statistical inference, and on research from ed...

This article introduces the recently adopted Guidelines for the Assessment and Instruction in Statistics Education (GAISE) and provides two examples of introductory statistics courses that have been redesigned to better align with these guidelines.

all rights reserved. This text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the authors and advance notification of the editor. Abstract Since the first studies on the teaching and learning of statistics appeared in the research literature, the scholarship in this area has...

Informal inferential reasoning is a relatively recent concept in the research literature. Several research studies have defined this type of cognitive process in slightly different ways. In this paper, a working definition of informal inferential reasoning based on an analysis of the key aspects of statistical inference, and on research from educat...

Increased attention is being paid to the need for statistically educated citizens: statistics is now included in the K-12 mathematics curriculum, increasing numbers of students are taking courses in high school, and introductory statistics courses are required in college. However, increasing the amount of instruction is not sufficient to prepare st...

Appendices: leaves 111-150. Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Minnesota, 2006. Major: Educational psychology. Includes bibliographical reference (leaves 94-110)

Initiated by J. Garfield, this invited panel session focused on the logistics of conducting collegiate statistics education research. Topics included ethical and practical issues, when and how to get Internal Review Board (IRB) approval, using student assessment data as the basis of a research project, and making the transition from other disciplin...

The NSF-funded CATALST project has developed a radically different undergraduate introductory-statistics course that uses randomization and resampling approaches as the only methods for statistical inference. This course is based on research in cognitive science, mathematics and engineering education, as well as in statistics education. A carefully...