CPEP Colloquium talk – Studying and Improving Students' Learning in Complex Domains: The Case of Introductory Statistics

How do students learn hard stuff? There are four parts to this talk. I will first present the Practicing Connections theory (more like a working hypothesis) for how students develop flexible transferable knowledge in complex domains. In the second part, I will present the “better book” approach, in which we apply principles of improvement science to studying and improving the teaching of college-level statistics. In the third part, I will provide some examples of the research that has resulted from this approach. Finally, I will briefly discuss how our project relates to the Open Education Resources (OER) movement, and propose some new features of an OER 2.0 that address some pitfalls in using OER in a program of continuous improvement.

James Stigler is Distinguished Professor of Psychology at UCLA. His research focuses on teaching and learning, especially in mathematics and statistics, and its intersection with culture and technology. He is co-author of two popular books: The Teaching Gap (with James Hiebert) and The Learning Gap (with Harold Stevenson). He was Director of the TIMSS video studies, and a co-founder of two educational technology startups (LessonLab and Zaption) and the nonprofit coursekata.org. He received his A.B. from Brown University and Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology from the University of Michigan.