This year, our research efforts centered on the improvement science approach behind CourseKata by prioritizing the experiences of students from racially marginalized backgrounds and leveraging the unique and diverse CourseKata community—including researchers, instructors, curriculum designers, developers, and students themselves. At the heart of our work, we’ve aimed to adopt a contextual and systems approach, moving away from blaming students and instead focusing on the environments, structures, and supports within CourseKata materials that shape their learning experiences.
DREAM
In November, CourseKata hosted its second annual DREAM convening, dedicated to advancing research and fostering collaboration in statistics and data science education. Building on the momentum of last year’s inaugural event, DREAM 2024 featured five lightning talks from research teams across five institutions, fostering lively discussions and an atmosphere brimming with energy. Teams presented findings and introduced new projects designed to drive meaningful, large-scale impact.
Check out our DREAM 2024 blogpost for a full recap.
Thank you to our passionate and driven CourseKata Research Community for making this event a success!
DATAFEST
The projects showcased during DataFest highlighted not only the richness of CourseKata’s dataset but also the creativity and analytical prowess of participants. One standout team from UCLA, including Chelsea Chen, Justin Gong, Hairan Liang, Lukas Hager, and Terry Ming, developed an engine to adjust feedback and direct students to specific learning resources.
Following the event, several winning teams were invited to join CourseKata’s research team as interns. These participants further developed their projects during summer and fall, contributing valuable insights to the ongoing refinement of CourseKata’s textbooks and resources.
This continuous feedback loop underscores CourseKata’s commitment to creating educational materials informed by both data and student perspectives, forging a new path for digital curricula. Check out our Datafest 2024 recap blogpost for more details on the innovative projects, inspiring participants, and the impact of DataFest on CourseKata's mission to improve statistics and data science education.
COURSEKATA RESEARCHER SPOTLIGHT
Congratulations to Dr. Judith Fan (Principal Investigator, Stanford) and her team on receiving two years of NSF funding for their project, "Improved Measures of Data Visualization Literacy to Advance Research and Assessment in STEM Education" (NSF Project Description). This project recognizes the pivotal role of data visualization literacy in communicating quantitative data effectively. It seeks to evaluate and improve existing measures, developing unified tools for advancing STEM education. Dr. Fan and her collaborators just launched a randomized control trial experiment in CourseKata materials this Fall supported by this grant! We eagerly await the results to help improve students' learning and engagement in learning about data visualizations.
FEATURED RESEARCH
In 2024, CourseKata researchers presented their work over 20 times and we published over 10 articles! Check out the full list of publications on our research resources website. 
Centering student voices leads to widespread benefits
We collaborated with Dr. Matt Jackson (Cal State LA) to apply the "Better Book" approach with a focus on improving equity by centering the experiences of racially marginalized students. By disaggregating marginalized students' experiences using pulse checks—targeted questions capturing motivational experiences (success expectancy, value, and workload cost) at the start of each chapter—we identified barriers in an introductory statistics curriculum. Notably, students from racially minoritized backgrounds reported higher perceptions of cost, particularly during chapter 7.
In response, we redesigned the chapter, incorporating a more visual approach first, splitting it into two chapters, and evening out chapter length for consistency. Comparing students’ experiences before and after the revised textbook revealed a reduction in perceived cost for all students, with the most significant improvements among racially marginalized students. These findings suggest that addressing barriers faced by minoritized students enhances the learning experience for everyone, highlighting the importance of inclusive curriculum design in fostering equitable and effective education.
Check out the full paper in Ed Sciences!
Students who believe learning requires a lot of memorization tend to perform worse in introductory statistics
Jose Salas, Xinran Wang, and Mary Tucker were collecting data in CourseKata before and after the COVID19 pandemic, so this unique study documented this predictive relationship between memorization and performance in both face-to-face and remote instruction (when a lot of instructors allowed for open-textbook exams). Read more in their Online Learning Journal paper.
COURSEKATA GOES INTERNATIONAL!
CourseKata research went international in 2024! Dr. Claudia Sutter, our Director of Research, organized and chaired a symposium at the International Conference on Motivation & Emotion (ICM) at the University of Bern, Switzerland.
The symposium highlighted the need for research to move beyond general trends in motivation and explore how situational and contextual factors influence fluctuations in motivation at a micro-level. Understanding these moment-to-moment experiences is crucial for examining how students interact with their environments, offering richer insights into their learning processes.
OPEN DATA GITHUB REPOSITORY
Explore our newly organized open data git repository with tools and resources for processing and analyzing CourseKata data.
UPDATED RESEARCH WEBSITE
We’ve revamped our research resources website to feature a comprehensive resources page, supporting and empowering researchers to understand, process, and analyze CourseKata data more effectively.
LOOKING AHEAD
Reflecting on 2024, we are reminded of the transformative power of collaboration and innovation in education. From the insights shared during DREAM 2024 to the creative projects born out of DataFest, the contributions of our CourseKata research community continue to shape the future of statistics and data science education.
We look forward to 2025, committed to advancing tools, curricula, and research that equip students with the skills they need to thrive in a data-driven world. Together, we’re building a better future for education!
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