Teaching & Research

Teaching and research are equally important for me. The following quote represents my view on the matter:

“I am a teacher. I am a professor. I could never do research without doing teaching. Teaching and research are one. Teaching, in fact, is the handmaiden of research. When I teach. I am forced to confront what I think is the truth. I am forced to confront it by telling my students. And they’re pretty smart. And if I don’t know what I’m talking about, they know it. And so, therefore, I deeply thank my students…who push me to the frontiers of knowledge every day.”

- Professor Claudia Gilgin on winning the 2023 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences

Teaching

Most of my “formal” teaching has happened in the Department of Statistics at the University of Costa Rica. There, I have taught and TAed a variety of courses ranging from basic stats to mathematical statistics. Some of them are:

  • XS-0215: Biostatistics
  • XS-1110: Introduction to Statistics I
  • XS-1130: Introduction to Statistics II
  • XS-2330: Continuous Probabilistic Models
  • XS-3150: Statistical Principles for the Design of Experiments I
  • XS-3170: Applied Statistics for Experimental Designs
  • XS-3310: Theory of Statistics

At the University of Minnesota I am currently the instructor of:

  • EPSY-3264: Basic and Applied Statistics

For more details, check my CV.

Research

I am a master student of the Statistics Education program at the University of Minnesota, under the supervision of Dr. Chelsey Legacy and Dr. Andrew Zieffler. I am studying under a Fulbright scholarship.

For my master degree research, I am analyzing some of the psychometrics properties of the third version of the Statistics Teacher Inventory (STI), a survey designed to collect information on teaching practices of introductory statistics instructors in a variety of institutions and departments across the United States post-secondary education system, so we can 1) create a better understanding of the instrument itself, 2) improve the instrument for latter versions, and 3) analyze the relationship between the latent constructs measured by the STI and the Guidelines for Assessment and Instruction in Statistics Education (GAISE).

I am also doing research with some cool research groups. These are: Lab for Advancing Statistics Education Research (LASER) and Minnesota Youth Development Research Group (MyDrG).

Overall, I like to get involved in all the stages (from planning to monitoring, and, the most fun part, performing statistical analysis) of research that, primarily, seeks to answer questions that may have a positive impact in educational settings. My research interests can be summarized into:

  • Teaching and learning of Statistics
  • Measurement on statistics education research
  • Statistics learning trajectories
  • Statistical reasoning

I want to continue my formal education through a PhD program that helps me answer some of the following questions:

  • What is the state of teaching and learning statistics in Latin American countries at the undergraduate level?
    • How do Latin American students learn statistics?
    • How do Latin American statistics educators teach statistics?
    • How can GAISE provide, if at all, an useful framework to teach and learn statistics in Latin American countries?
  • How students most effectively learn and communicate statistical information through text?
    • How natural language processing can help the statistics learning process?
    • Which factors can influence students’ ability to learn complex statistical concepts from text?
  • How does a statistic learning trajectory look like in a introductory Bayesian class?