Research on learning and commercial software development competes strongly for a project's scarce resources, and yet they have widely overlapping goals. If they could be made to coexist, their synergy could improve both processes. On the research side, to use software to help understand how students perceive and learn statistical concepts requires a software platform that is stable, easy for students to use, and flexible enough to allow different models to be tried; that is, the research benefits from a smoothly functioning development process. On the development side, there is great need for insight into the learning process to inform the software design, and need for research methods to test whether any given design works with students and improves their statistical understanding.
The CAUSE Research Group is supported in part by a member initiative grant from the American Statistical Association’s Section on Statistics and Data Science Education