Welcome to my Research and Scholarship page! Below, you will find links to project pages for some of my projects.

Note: to return to this site from any of the project pages, click on my name listed under project team.


Interests

My work applies theories and methods from the cognitive and learning sciences to investigate the act of learning and doing statistics, and critically examines statistics education research theories and methodologies.

Generally speaking, my work falls into one of three categories:

  • investigations of the cognitive processes underlying statistical thinking,
  • psychometric studies of the assessment of cognitive and non-cognitive characteristics related to learning and doing statistics, and
  • design-based educational research to develop new statistics pedagogies.

In my own projects, or when working with others, I seek to be a part of interdisciplinary teams founded on mutual curiosity and passion – “I cannot imagine being a sole researcher on any project or keeping ideas to myself” (Garfield, 2013, p. 6)1.


Active Projects

Harnessing AI to Develop Students’ Statistical Thinking

AI tools are here to stay. How do they change the way statistics can be practiced and taught? How do we ensure AI drives students’ learning of statistics, as opposed to being used as a crutch to circumvent the development of statistical thinking skills?
For more, visit RaoVNV.github.io/HarnessingAI/.

Authentic Statistical Graphical Literacy

Graphs we see in our every day lives are often quite different than the graphs students are exposed to in introductory statistics courses. Can students interpret what authentic graphs they may see in their every days do and do not reveal? How we can measure their skills in doing so? How to support the development of these skills?
For more, visit RaoVNV.github.io/authenticliteracy/.

Accepting Uncertainty

Statistics is not a set of this-or-that rules. It is all about uncertainty and variability. A key component of statistical thinking is to accept this inherent uncertainty. How ready are students to do this? How accepting of uncertainty do they walk out of statistics classes? Are students’ views about statistics consistent with statisticians’ views related to uncertainty?
For more, visit RaoVNV.github.io/acceptuncertainty/.


Ongoing Projects

Categorization of Statistical Measures

How do the statistically significant and not statistically significant category labels, or other sets of category labels, affect our cognition of statistical measures like p-values and Cohen’s d effect sizes?
For more, visit RaoVNV.github.io/p-values/.

Human Clustering

How do humans cluster sets of points? Is their clustering reliable? What individual and group differences are there in human clustering? What other cognitive processes is clustering related to?
For more, visit RaoVNV.github.io/clustering/.

  1. Garfield, J. (2013). Cooperative learning revisited: From an instructional method to a way of life. Journal of Statistics Education, 21(2).↩︎