Kit Clement

Welcome! I am a statistics educator and statistics education researcher at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. As a statistics educator, my passion for teaching is centered around preparing my students to be more informed citizens. Statistics are necessary to translate data into usable information, but those who wield statistics have not only the power to understand the world, they have the power to shape others’ understandings as well. Public discourse and media sources are slipping into an era of sensationalism and post-truth, where information is presented with confidence, yet is often uncited and unsubstantiated. The public’s best defense to this is a well-rounded statistics education that gives them the ability to find and collect relevant data, interpret the data, and draw conclusions, while also being able to critique others’ conclusions drawn from data. My courses emphasize interpreting results of statistical analyses and understanding the assumptions behind the methods conducted so that students can look at conclusions drawn with a critical lens.

As a statistics education researcher, my interests focus on modeling and simulation-based curriculum in introductory statistics courses, using tools like TinkerPlots or CODAP. I've developed activities and a learning trajectory for simple linear regression models, which serves as an extension to the CATALST curriculum. I have recently developed a curriculum that integrates probability modeling in TinkerPlots with data analysis in R to support students' statistical reasoning, which I currently teach in Stat 200 at Illinois.