Posted on Monday, September 10, 2007
Dr. Carolyn Cuff, Westminster College professor of mathematics and chair of the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, participated in several workshops during the summer.
Cuff was an invited participant in the Science Educators Resource Center (SERC) workshop at The Ohio State University. The goal of the workshop was to develop and publish a statistics activity to be used in introductory statistics courses in a variety of settings (1,000+ student classroom down to less than 30). The publication of "Count the Fs" is the result of that workshop. Visit http://serc.carleton.edu/sp/cause/interactive/examples/18173.html to view the activity.
Cuff was invited to lead a workshop, "Preparing to Teach at the Next Level - Careers in Teaching Statistics," with Paul Roback at the US Conference on Teaching Statistics (USCOTS) in Columbus. USCOTS is a biennial conference devoted to developing faculty and preparing them to become better teachers of statistics.
"My previous work in the development of future statistics educators has included developing a pipeline between research universities to supply liberal arts colleges with statistics professors, and liberal arts colleges to provide research universities with graduate students for statistics," Cuff said. "To accomplish this, I met and worked with professors at other liberal arts colleges and at research universities. This workshop was an extension of that work, intended to introduce graduate students to the application process for a liberal arts college professor position."
In June, Cuff graded advanced placement statistics exams as a table leader. She continues as part of the leadership team for this activity.
In July, Cuff was a one-day leader at the Statistics for Math Educators conference hosted by Westminster and funded by the National Science Foundation through CAUSEway. Eight educators from three states attended the workshop led by Brian Jersky of St. Mary's College and Rob Gould of UCLA, nationally-known statistics educators. Cuff presented a lecture on developing sampling distributions, a key concept in inference statistics.
Cuff has been with Westminster since 1989. She received her undergraduate degree at Westminster, and her master's and Ph.D. at Case Western Reserve University.
Contact Cuff at (724) 946-7291 or e-mail ccuff@westminster.edu for additional information.
