The 2025 US Conference on Teaching Statistics was held at Iowa State University July 17–19. Approximately 350 statistics and data science teachers and education researchers attended.
Photo by Todd Swanson
Four keynote presenters addressed various aspects of the conference theme, Useful Models. Beth Chance suggested modeling provides a unifying theme for teaching introductory courses and beyond, while Hadley Wickham described how to leverage and effectively engage with large language models in R. Prince Afruiyie argued for the importance of capturing students’ attention and modeled effective strategies for doing that successfully. Finally, Jeff Witmer encouraged teachers to emphasize effect sizes, teach logistic regression in introductory courses, and replace the language of “statistical significance” with “statistical discernibility.”
The conference also featured 35 breakout sessions on a variety of topics, including the following:
- Teaching statistics online
- Using games to develop students’ decision-making skills
- Developing alternative grading models
- Using digital image data to introduce classification algorithms
- Sharing social justice resources for teaching
- Making mathematical statistics courses more modern
More features of the conference program were 65 poster presentations, 28 birds-of-a-feather discussions, and seven exhibitor demonstration/test-drive sessions.
The conference banquet was another highlight, featuring Zarek Drozda presenting on charting a course for data science in grades K–12. Heather Nichols, Michael Posner, and Larry Lesser entertained the banquet audience with performances of their award-winning songs and poems. Also, Matt Beckman presented the 2025 George Cobb Award for Lifetime Achievement in Statistics Education to Beth Chance.
Pre-conference activities included 14 workshops on topics as varied as teaching statistical learning, empowering students through socially relevant data, bringing web scraping and API queries into classroom projects, and writing poems/lyrics for teaching statistics.
Photo by Laura Le
Approximately 100 researchers in statistics and data science education attended a satellite conference, which featured 17 poster presentations, four research presentations, and a keynote address by Anna Fergusson on her perspective of navigating a career in statistics and data science research in New Zealand. Additionally, about 75 statisticians and data scientists at liberal arts colleges attended a symposium prior to the conference at which Paul Roback gave a keynote talk about the joys and challenges of life as a liberal arts statistician. The liberal arts symposium also included lightning talks and discussion sessions on 17 topics.
All the keynote sessions are freely available on the USCOTS website, and more resources provided by conference presenters can be found on the conference program page.
USCOTS was organized by Kelly McConville and Allan Rossman (program chairs), Laura Ziegler (local coordinator), and Andrew Ferguson (technology support) under the supervision of Matt Beckman, director of the Consortium for the Advancement of Undergraduate Statistics Education, which is housed at and supported by the Penn State Department of Statistics. Conference sponsors included JMP, Wiley, ASA, Mintab, Pearson, McGraw-Hill, R-guroo, SAS, and Macmillan.
The next USCOTS will be held in 2027. The Electronic Conference on Teaching Statistics will be conducted virtually June 15–18, 2026.
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