ANDREW ZIEFFLER’S HOMEPAGE
What can you find on this homepage? You can find out about me, about statistics education research, and about some of my research interests. You can also find links to other websites that may be of interest to statistics education researchers. If you are a student, or just an interested third party, you can find links to each of the courses I teach on the left-hand side of the homepage.
I received a degree in Mathematics Education from Saint Cloud State University in 1997. From 1998-2002, I took a job teaching high school students the beauty of mathematics at ROCORI High School (Cold Spring, Minnesota). During those four years I began a Master's Degree in the History of Mathematics, again at SCSU. I also had a wonderful opportunity to develop and teach the high school's A.P. Statistics course. This inspired me to continue my graduate education at the University of Minnesota, this time emphasizing statistics education. In 2006, I obtained a PhD in Quantitative Methods in Education with a concentration in Statistics Education. [My CV]
Statistics education is a fairly young area of research that has been influenced by several other fields of study such as psychology and mathematics education. Researchers working in this field have generally focused their efforts on how to improve student learning of statistics, often via improving statistics instruction. The Research Advisory Board of the Consortium for the Advancement of Undergraduate Statistics Education, in fact, suggests that the results of statistics education research should have direct implications for instruction, and further, that research studies should specifically address classroom implications. Since it is an interdisciplinary field of inquiry, statistics education research has not endorsed any one particular empirical research method. Researchers have employed many differing methodologies to help provide answers to a variety of research questions in this field.
The CAUSE Research Advisory Board has put together a list of readings to assist people wishing to learn about research in statistics education or to provide background for those wanting to do research in this area. The list includes readings about the nature of statistics and how it differs from mathematics, summaries of research, discussions of research issues in statistics education research, and books devoted to research in statistics education. It also includes readings related to different topics of interest in statistics education research (e.g., technology, assessment) and concepts that are often included in the statistics curriculum (e.g., data, center, and variability).
In my dissertation research, I used linear mixed-effects models to examine students' development of covariational reasoning during an introductory statistics course. This has sparked an interest in further examining student's development, or growth, of statistical reasoning. I am also interested in statistical computing and in thinking about different ways to integrate computing into the statistics curriculum. Deb Nolan and Duncan Temple-Lang have an interesting paper on how broadly teachers of statistics need to be thinking about computing in today’s day and age available here. Lastly. I am interested in data visualization and how data will be displayed and conveyed in Web 3.0.