University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Kelly is a Teaching Associate Professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. With his PhD training in Curriculum and Instruction, Kelly primarily conducts qualitative research that seeks to capture rich examples of student thinking. He aims to create work that builds theory regarding both students' intuition about statistical concepts and student perspectives of the broader discipline.

Resources and Tensions in Student Thinking about Statistical Design

Reform efforts in statistics education emphasize the need for students to develop statistical thinking. Critical to this goal is a solid understanding of design in the process of collecting data, evaluating evidence, and drawing conclusions. We collected survey responses from over 700 college students at the start of an introductory statistics course to determine how they evaluated the validity of different designs. Despite preferring different designs, students offered a variety of productive arguments supporting their choices. Our results highlight that instruction should frame design as the balancing of different priorities: namely causality, generalizability, and power.