CAUSEmos: CAUSE Making Outreach Sustainable for Statistics Educators

The Consortium for the Advancement of Undergraduate Statistics Education (CAUSE) is building a sustainable cycle of outreach activities including a biennial U.S. Conference On Teaching Statistics (USCOTS). Statistics educators are collaborating with others and contributing back to the community of undergraduate statistics educators. Collaborators are organized into clusters with aligned interests, and then into interacting clusters. These interacting clusters are designed to move the statistics education community forward more rapidly than the sum of the activities of the teachers who compose it.

Intellectual Merit: This outreach effort is grounded in modern and innovative projects, many of which have been funded by the NSF. USCOTS incorporates a myriad of lively and engaging teaching techniques, ideas, and resources in its sessions and social activities. An existing CAUSE sponsored digital library at CAUSEweb.org, a major national program of workshops, and well-planned year-round activities complement USCOTS. Further, ongoing mentoring and support for collaborations; web based seminars (Webinars) and other virtual meeting opportunities; a regular widely read E-News; a developing set of electronic handbooks to guide new and continuing cluster members; a needs assessment underpinning an effective evaluation plan; and strong partnerships with numerous professional organizations assure that CAUSEmos becomes integral to a cohesive growing and advancing community of statistics educators. The CAUSEmos program also helps classroom teachers benefit from current research and turn their classes into research labs to study and improve their teaching, as well as connect with larger research teams to look more broadly at important problems.

Broader Impact: Coupled with an innovative support program of lead-up and follow-up activities and reunions, participants at USCOTS return to their home institutions to relay the pedagogy and research content and methods they have learned to students and colleagues. The CAUSEmos program target graduate students, AP statistics teachers, instructors at two-year colleges, and the broad community of statistics instructors based in departments of mathematics, social science, and business to become connected, to collaborate, and to contribute. The national impact is further enhanced by the global communities of educators with access to the CAUSEweb library of digital resources, including products thing produced by those exploring the CAUSEmos.