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.
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 two categories:
As Dr. Joan Garfield once said, “I cannot imagine being a sole researcher on any project or keeping ideas to myself” (Garfield, 2013, p. 6)1.
If you’re a statistician looking for a psychologist, or a psychologist looking for a statistician, or generally interested in collaborating on research in statistical cognition or statistics education, I would love to set a time to chat with you.
What computational thinking skills are needed in order to successfully utilize generative AI applications to complete statistical and data related tasks? How can these technologies help broaden participation in STEM? For more, visit link coming soon.
However, 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/.
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 to they walk out of statistics classes? Are students’ views about statistics consistent with statisticians’ views? For more, visit RaoVNV.github.io/acceptuncertainty.
How do the statistically significant and not statistically significant 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/.
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/.
Garfield, J. (2013). Cooperative learning revisited: From an instructional method to a way of life. Journal of Statistics Education, 21(2).↩︎