Beth Chance

Affiliation
Professor of Statistics, Department of Statistics, Cal Poly – San Luis Obispo

Educational Background
Harvey Mudd College: BS, Applied Mathematics (1990)
Cornell University: MS, Operations Research (1992)
Cornell University: PhD, Operations Research (1994)

About Beth
I grew up in San Diego, California, and always loved mathematics. However, I was never sure about what I would “do” with it. In college, I found I also had a love for psychology and how people learn. In my senior year at Harvey Mudd College, I took and very much enjoyed courses in operations research. It really felt like the first time I saw how to use math to solve real-world problems. I applied to graduate programs in both educational psychology and operations research, finally choosing the latter as the path that would be more difficult to return to later.

At Cornell, I was able to minor in education, as well as earn my MS and PhD; my thesis combined my two loves: hierarchical models applied to education data. This was back when Gibbs sampling was just making waves, and I had to teach myself about empirical Bayes, S+, and C—even the double Laplace distribution!

Since then, I have been primarily teaching statistics, trying hard to make it as applicable as possible to anyone who will listen! I have been lucky to work with some amazing statistics educators and educational researchers on curriculum development, technology, and assessment. With Allan Rossman and others, I have written three textbooks aimed at the introductory course (two for non-majors and one for majors).

One of my most rewarding long-term projects has been an applet collection that requires me to keep teaching myself programming skills and allows me to witness first-hand the development of student understanding as they explore key concepts on their own. In fact, I’m back to using HLMs on very messy data—analyzing cross-institutional data on student performance and attitudes for different introductory curricula.

I was the inaugural winner of the ASA’s Waller Education Award for innovation in the instruction of elementary statistics. I also received the Mu Sigma Rho Statistical Education Award and was elected a Fellow of the American Statistical Association in 2005. The Rossman/Chance applet collection was awarded the CAUSE Resource of the Year Award (2009) and the MERLOT Award for Exemplary Online Materials (2011). My latest joint textbook, Introduction to Statistical Investigations, received the 2017 Text and Academic Authors Association Award for Most Promising New Textbook. I am currently working with the same team on a textbook for a conceptually-based second course in statistics for non-majors. I am also the 2018 chair of the ASA’s Section on Statistical Education.