Professor Deborah Nolan of Statistics says, "There is an 'AHA!' quality to figuring out the chance that someone someone wins the lottery twice and to figuring out whether you should switch doors when Monte Hall opens one to reveal a donkey. One of my goals is to get students to shout 'AHA!' when they solve these problems."
She succeeds at this, and admirably, according to her students: "I would say the best aspect of her teaching genius is her ability to introduce complex, theoretical concepts in statistics and bring them down to the real world. This made learning easier and at the same time pleasurable."
Large numbers of students in statistics courses come from other disciplines, and Nolan is noted for working with and encouraging all students in their understanding of statistics. A colleague marvels that "She employed an arsenal of pedagogical techniques to involve and challenge the students, to bring them quickly to an understanding of the basic concepts of probability and statistics, and then to expose them to exciting problems and original journal articles."
Nolan, whose research interests are empirical processes, and cross-validation and model selection, joined the Department of Statistics in 1986. She received her AB from Vassar College in 1977 and her PhD in statistics from Yale University in 1986.
Statement Of Teaching Philosophy
When I think broadly of what I hope my students will carry with them from my courses, it would be that their statistical training has helped them to think critically, work independently, and solve problems that are important to them. I also hope that they would have the ability to look at the world in which they work and live from a statistician's perspective. Not that they should necessarily remember formulas for computing a standard deviation or for performing a t-test. Rather, I would hope that they would be able to think statistically, by which I mean that they would have a sense of variation and how to use it to answer scientific questions.
My personal teaching style has been directly influenced by efforts to meld the best of two worlds: my own undergraduate experience at a small liberal arts college and the great research activities at Berkeley. In a workshop on teaching, I learned the importance of looking for the strengths in my teaching style and making the best use of them. I found that I naturally have an informal manner of speaking, and I have developed my teaching style to both convey my knowledge of the material and to include students in the learning process.
The content of my courses draws on the interdisciplinary framework in which statistics developed. I use material taken from many different topical issues. In the lower division, my examples and stories come from the news and from statistics folklore. Students bring to class newspaper articles on quantitative studies that interest them, and I incorporate them into lectures, homework, and exams. In the upper division, students work on problems drawn from my colleagues' research and my own collaborative efforts. Students search for patterns in DNA, make maps of radon concentrations in Minnesota homes, and compare infant health for mothers who smoke or not during pregnancy. Statistics offers students a wonderful opportunity to develop their ability to think critically about the world around them in a way they had never envisioned.
The probability on which theoretical statistics is based is fun. There is an "AHA!" quality to finding the chance that someone at a party shares your birthday, to figuring out whether you should switch doors when Monte Hall opens one to reveal a donkey, and to computing the expected number of cracks a piece of cooked spaghetti will cross when thrown on the floor.
In class, I have students work together in groups on these problems. One of my goals is to get students to shout "AHA!" when they solve them.