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.
The CAUSEmos program was designed to connect instructors to the statistics education community through the United States Conference on Teaching Statistics (USCOTS), to form collaborations through special interest clusters that move them to the next level in their teaching, and to provide mechanisms for them to contribute back to the community of statistics educators as they themselves advance. The CAUSEmos initiative programs included a national program of outreach to college-level statistics instructors focused on hosting a major conference (the U.S. Conference On Teaching Statistics or "USCOTS" see www.CAUSEweb.org/uscots) and facilitating communities of faculty. Faculty communities in statistics education research, improving student attitudes towards the discipline, on-line teaching, and the study of using fun activities in teaching were all supported and were successful in building teachers’ knowledge and pedagogical skills. The USCOTS conference in 2007, 2009, 2011, and 2013 each drew between 400 and 500 participants while greatly decreasing the need for public funds with each succeeding conference. Before each of these conferences, the CAUSEmos initiative also featured multi-day workshops to help disseminate the results of other NSF funded statistics education projects. Nineteen different workshops were hosted in this way providing a major professional development opportunity for hundreds of instructors. A further virtual conference was created (the Electronic Conference On Teaching Statistics or eCOTS) that also drew more than 400 participants and allowed statistics instructors to participate who were otherwise unable to afford the costs of travel to a major meeting.
