Dr. Kelly McConville Co-Chairs United States Conference on Teaching Statistics

Dr. Kelly McConville, Senior Lecturer in Statistics, was the Co-Program Chair with Professor Allan Rossman of Cal Poly-San Luis Obispo for the United States Conference on Teaching Statistics (USCOTS) from May 30^th through June 1st, 2023, at State College, Pennsylvania with 321 educators in attendance.  The Consortium for the Advancement of Undergraduate Statistics Education (CAUSE) has held USCOTS every other year since 2005.  Designed for teachers of statistics at the high school and college levels, the conference centers on pedagogical best practices and features a different theme every year.  Discussing the significance of this year's theme, "Communicating With/About Data," McConville explained in a podcast how as the data and models get messier and as the topics become more complex, such as the concepts of confounding and variation, it becomes crucial to effectively extract knowledge from and tell the story of data to stakeholders in a clear way (source: Stats and Stories, Episode 288).

Addressing the theme of communicating with and about data, the conference featured 52 poster presentations, 13 pre-conference workshops, 29 breakout sessions, and 33 birds-of-a-feather discussions.  Some of the topics included statistical writing, alternative grading practices, teaching coding, teaching social justice, and the role of AI in the classroom.  To learn more about this memorable conference, please read McConville and Rossman's August 1, 2023 AMSTAT news article.