Sheila Barron Email & Phone Number

When asked what I do, I am sometimes tempted to lie or obfuscate. Not because what I do is illegal or immoral, but because of the reaction I get when I say I teach statistics. Often, the questioner makes an unpleasant facial expression—possibly along with an audible groan—and comments about how much they hated their statistics classes, or they took statistics and did OK but never really “got it.” Recently I’ve been emerging from a bit of a mid-life crisis (I recommend everyone have one – don’t feel you need to wait for “mid-life”). In closely examining what I feel passionate about and want to spend the rest of my working life on, I realized that it is changing that perception of statistics as something unpleasant or incomprehensible. Although some amazing people have been working diligently on changing statistics education for about 20 years (e.g., Joan Garfield, Allan Rossman, Cliff Konold, Chick Ahlgren, George Cobb, Jessica Utts), there is still so much that desperately needs to be done and so many avenues for change to worth exploring. Specialties: Teaching, quantitative statistics, problem solving, SAS programming, consulting.

Listed skills include Applied Statistics, Teaching, Data Analysis, Spss, and 6 others.

• 

  University Of Iowa

  Educational Measurement And Statistics