USCOTS 2023

CAUSE has held the United States Conference on Teaching Statistics (USCOTS) every other year since 2005. The 2023 USCOTS will be held on Thursday, June 1^st - Saturday, June 3^rd at the Penn Stater Conference Center in State College, Pennsylvania, with pre-conference workshops on Tuesday, May 30^th – Thursday, June 1^st. The conference theme is Communicating with/about Data.

USCOTS enables teachers of statistics to exchange ideas and discover how to improve their teaching. The conference features thought-provoking plenary sessions, interactive breakout sessions, informative posters-and-beyond sessions, and exhibitor technology demonstrations. Other highlights of the conference include opening and closing sessions comprised of inspiring five-minute presentations, a banquet with an after-dinner speaker and awards presentations, and birds-of-a-feather lunch discussions.

We trust that you will find USCOTS to provide a very welcoming, active, and fun environment. We hope that you will meet new colleagues and renew friendships with peers who are united by a common desire to teach statistics and data science effectively to the next generation of citizens and scholars.

About the Theme:

Communicating is an essential component of all academic disciplines. Statistics is by no means exempt. All aspects of a statistical investigation – asking questions, designing studies, collecting data, analyzing data, drawing conclusions – involve communication. Conducting an important study and gaining key insights are only worthwhile if the findings can be communicated effectively to stakeholders and the public.

Moreover, all human interactions rely on effective communication. Teaching and learning are by no means exempt. A key aspect of teaching involves communication between teacher and learner, in both directions, as well as among learners.

That explains the first word in our conference theme. What about the last word, the other capitalized word? Data lie at the center of the practice of statistics, as well as the teaching and learning of statistics. Statistics teachers strive for their students to become adept with data in all aspects, from collecting to wrangling to analyzing to drawing conclusions.

This brings us to the two prepositions in the theme. Communicating with data is crucial for making evidence-based arguments, for making others aware of insights that one garners from working with data. Such communication occurs in many ways: with words for sure, but also through visualizations, summaries, code, and notation. Helping students to communicate well with data is an integral, and challenging, objective in most statistics courses.

Communicating about data is what statistics teachers do on a daily basis. Teachers communicate with students to lead them to explore and develop their understanding about statistical concepts, such as variability, sampling, bias, confounding, tendency, association, and on and on.

This conference will feature sessions that address all aspects of Communicating with/about Data, with two broad sub-themes:

Helping students to communicate the process and results of their statistical analyses,
Helping teachers to communicate with students in order to develop their understanding of statistical concepts and their ability to implement statistical methods.