Maria Tackett

Assistant Professor of the Practice of Statistical Science

I am a key personnel on the project “Collaborative Research: Accelerating the pace of research and implementation of Writing-to-Learn pedagogies across STEM disciplines”. This project is funded by an NSF Improving Undergraduate STEM Education grant. Students in STA 199 in the Spring 2019 semester were a test group for a study on the effectiveness of writing interventions in helping students understand complex statistical concepts. Based on data from students in STA 199 during previous semesters, the writing interventions focus on understanding conditional probabilities and statistical inference using bootstrapping and randomization tests.

I am currently working on a paper about measuring the dependencies in the weight of fingerprint evidence that arise when multiple candidates are examined as the potential source of a latent print. This work is building off of work from my dissertation and is part of the Center for Statistics and Applications in Forensic Evidence (CSAFE).

I am working with Kristin Stephens-Martinez in Computer Science on a study about the relationship between a student’s predicted and actual scores on an exam, and how that relationship is influenced by factors such as race, gender, previous statistics experience, major, etc. We will also study how this relationship is influenced an exam wrapper activity after the first midterm exam. Students in introductory computer science courses and STA 210 are the proposed participant population for the study.