Building a Statistical Paradigm and Infrastructure for Mathematics Education Research

Plenary Speaker
Dennis Pearl
The Ohio State University

Recently, the American Statistical Association partnered with NSF in hosting three workshops on Statistics in Mathematics Education Research (SMER).  The SMER workshops brought together mathematics education researchers and statisticians to focus on developing a paradigm for an education research program, on making recommendations of best practices, and on guidelines for reporting about statistical aspects of mathematics education research.   The final report of this working group was issued in January 2007.  This talk will describe the lessons of this report.   The talk will also describe our efforts at Ohio State in building an INiative for QUantitative Education Research Infrastructure (INQUERI) that includes a national database of assessment information shared by a large consortium of institutions using a consistent set of instruments, gathering a consistent set of baseline data about their students, their teachers, and their institution, all kept in a secure national data archive under approved human subjects standards. Hopefully, building this infrastructure will help eliminate barriers to the kinds of sound research programs called for in the SMER report.

Return to the 2007 Conference on RUME home page.