Brenda Gunderson coordinates and teaches the largest undergraduate statistics course, Statistics and Data Analysis, with approximately 2200 students each term. She serves as the Graduate Student Instructor (GSI) Training Leader, developing and leading the training for new Statistics GSIs in both general teaching pedagogy and course specific details. Her research focuses on Statistical Education, in particular using technology to enhance teaching and learning.
Brenda has received the UM Teaching Innovation Prize for her work on Infusing Technology for Guided Continuous Learning in a Large Gateway Course. By carefully selecting and interweaving technologies, instructors can guide groups of students through challenging material in a way that feels highly personalized. She was co-investigator for a UM grant called Enhancing Undergraduate Education through the Deployment of Quality Learning Objects. This grant work led to receiving the Innovative Use of MERLOT Award and a Sloan-C Effective Practice Award. She is involved in various projects on interventions to help engage students and provide multiple paths for developing, practicing, and testing their understanding of concepts. Some of these projects focuses on the analysis and use of data about our students, courses, and programs for improving teaching and learning. Her recent work has been in ECoach is a personalized coaching tool that supports students in large introductory courses, where one-on-one contact between instructors and hundreds or thousands of students is impossible. We use tailored communications to give students feedback about their performance and motivate them to improve their study behaviors. Students are exposed to excellent content and advice not only useful in their statistics educational experience for that term, but could also be applied to other courses and areas of their life.
