The Department of Statistics at Iowa State University hosted the 2025 United States Conference on Teaching Statistics (USCOTS) July 15–19, drawing roughly 350 participants from across the U.S. and abroad, including attendees from New Zealand and England. The conference is among the largest events ever hosted by the department.
Organized by the Consortium for the Advancement of Undergraduate Statistics Education (CAUSE), the conference carried the theme “Useful Models” and featured keynote talks, breakout sessions, workshops, and networking events.
The conference featured four keynote speakers who shared fresh perspectives on statistics education:
- Beth Chance (Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo) presented “Teaching about models: A unifying topic?”, exploring ways to unify introductory statistics courses around modeling without major curriculum changes.
- Hadley Wickham (Posit PBC) gave “A no bullshit guide to programming with LLMs in R,” highlighting practical tools for working with large language models in data science.
- Prince Afriyie (University of Virginia) spoke on “Students’ ‘attention is all you need’ to transform complexity to clarity,” showing how focusing student attention can improve understanding of complex models.
- Jeff Witmer (Oberlin College) delivered “Be effective; don’t be significant,” emphasizing teaching effect sizes over p-values and suggesting logistic regression for introductory courses.
Wickham earned his PhD in statistics at Iowa State University in 2008.
Among the many voices at the conference was Dr. Simon Massey of Manchester Metropolitan University, who traveled from the United Kingdom to attend.
“I honestly have never felt more welcome at a conference and have to credit yourselves and the amazing group of colleagues in the network,” Dr. Massey said. “Some good connections have been made, and I hope we can come back in the future in any capacity.”
The event was made possible through the efforts of faculty, staff, graduate students, and community partners. Faculty member Laura Ziegler served as Local Arrangements Coordinator, managing everything from volunteers and room reservations to catering, shuttles, dorm assignments, finances, and registration. Wesley Cox, Anna Peterson, and Ulrike Genschel assisted with conference tasks, while Amy Froelich staffed registration daily. Graduate students handled registration, program outreach, and airport shuttles, with some trips made at 1 a.m. or during storms. Staff members Kathy Kiesling and Ann Hawkins provided essential support with catering and transportation. Discover Ames assisted with registration and sharing information about the Ames community.
Sponsors included the American Statistical Association, Minitab, Pearson, McGraw-Hill ALEKS, Macmillan Learning, RGuroo, SAS, and Penn State University, with premier sponsorship from JMP and Wiley.
USCOTS 2025 was led by Program Chairs Allan Rossman (Cal Poly) and Kelly McConville (Bucknell University), with Andrew Fergusson (Penn State) managing the website and registration and CAUSE Director Matt Beckman (Penn State) overseeing the conference.
Recordings of USCOTS 2025 sessions are available for viewing here.
Photos from the conference:
