Learning in the Classroom
A major "applied cognitive psychology" project we are pursuing involves studying and improving students' learning in an introductory statistics course. We are developing and testing a cognitive tutor for statistics, called StatTutor, that helps students work through data-analysis problems. By studying how students learn in a real classroom setting and by testing instructional interventions in the laboratory and classroom, we can converge on the best practices while gaining a better understanding of learning in complex domains.

Recent publications on this project:

• Meyer, O., & Lovett, M. C. (2002). Implementing a cognitive tutor in a statistical reasoning course: Getting the big picture. In Proceedings of the Sixth Annual International Conference on the Teaching of Statistics. (Article)

• Lovett, M. C. (2001). A Collaborative convergence on studying reasoning processes: A case study in statistics. In S. Carver, & D. Klahr (Eds.) Cognition and instruction: Twenty-five years of progress (pp. 347-384). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. (Article)

• Lovett, M. C., & Greenhouse, J. B. (2000). Applying cognitive theory to statistics instruction. The American Statistician, 54, 196-206. (Article)

Sponsors:
This material is based upon work supported by the Pew Foundation and by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0087632.
Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation 

Collaborators:
Cognitive scientists: Ken Koedinger (CMU),
Statisticians: Joel Greenhouse (CMU), Brian Junker (CMU), Rob Kass (CMU), Oded Meyer (CMU)  

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