Two recent developments in statistical education provide the opportunity for significant advances in helping non-statisician judge statistical claims.<br>(1) Research in statistical thinking has begun to yield models of people's conceptions that are detailed enough to have practical, pedagogical implications.<br>(2) Powerful new software tools designed explicitly for statistical education provide new visualizations with enormous potential for making statistical thinking accessible, for the first time, to the wide range of people who need to use it.<br>While these two developments are exciting in and of themselves, a collaboration between researchers and software designers would accelerate the development of both research and software in important ways. Currently both researchers and developers benefit in limited ways from each others' expertise and ongoing work, but taking full advantage of their respective contributions requires an explicit and organized effort with careful planning to achieve the benefits to each. We propose to create a paradignmatic illustration of such a collaboration, one which will have an impact on both software developers and researchers and, ultimately, on the productivity of the statistical education field.
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