CourseKata

This month, we’re featuring Claudia Sutter, our Director of Research, who celebrates her 6-year work anniversary at CourseKata this month!

Claudia leads efforts to systematically track and improve student experiences, maintain and advance CourseKata’s research infrastructure, and collaborate with external researchers to generate rigorous, data-driven insights. Her work centers on understanding student motivation, engagement, and learning, and translating these insights into meaningful improvements in curriculum design and classroom practice.

She is also a Research Fellow at Motivate Lab, a collaboration that deepens her understanding of how broader contexts shape student experiences and inform efforts to drive lasting, systemic change in education. Her work bridges research and practice to design learning experiences grounded in motivational theory and responsive to real-world classroom challenges.

Outside of her work, Claudia enjoys traveling with her husband and two sons to visit family in their home country, Switzerland, and she is an avid supporter of women’s soccer – especially the Orlando Pride ⚽💜

Join the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine virtual meeting on Transforming Undergraduate STEM Education through Technology! CourseKata’s Ji Son will be featured in the lightning talks, sharing how technology and data-centered course design can support more equitable and engaging STEM learning experiences.

📅 May 21, 2026
⏰ 11:00 AM–1:00 PM EDT
💻 Virtual Event
🔗Register here https://events.nationalacademies.org/46727

The meeting will bring together researchers, educators, and innovators to explore how technology can transform undergraduate STEM teaching and learning.

Transforming Undergraduate STEM Education: Virtual Meeting on Effective Undergraduate STEM Course Design through Technology Register for this event from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

Join us for the first The California State University CourseKata Teaching Innovation Potluck!

Faculty from CSU Fullerton, CSU Los Angeles, and CSU San Bernardino will come together to share how they’re using CourseKata in their statistics courses—what’s working, what’s challenging, and what’s next.

🗓 May 15, 2026
📍 California State University, Fullerton
⏰ 9:00 AM – 1:00 PM (Program: 9–12 | Lunch: 12–1)

This interactive session will focus on:
✨ Sharing teaching practices & innovations
✨ Reflecting on successes & challenges
✨ Generating ideas to improve student learning outcomes

RSVP: https://zurl.co/JzynL

Join our Teaching Innovation Potluck where featured instructors will share innovations that help CourseKata work for students.

Register here: https://zurl.co/QqbiK

For decades, the math wars have battled about whether math should be taught through explicit instruction or student discovery. But in practice (and in research), both sides are right AND incomplete.

Bill McCallum picked up on our Practicing Connections framework in his latest substack where we’ve been exploring how to combine productive struggle (students actively grappling with ideas), and explicit connections (making structure and meaning visible) as complementary parts of the learning experience.

So if you’ve ever felt stuck in this age old debate, this piece offers a different way to think about it: https://zurl.co/LQSfP

Connections and coherence Where's the math?

At CourseKata, we believe the challenge should be reasoning with data – not installing software.

With CKHub, everything runs directly in your learning management system, so students can jump right into working with real data.

Less troubleshooting. More learning. More engagement.

CourseKata is at the Western Psychological Association this Week!

Matthew Jackson will present on how college students perceive learning R in their intro stats course and how those experiences shape their interest in statistics and data science.

Stanley von Ehrenstein-Smith will explore how students’ use of AI in intro stats has evolved since 2020, and what that means for engagement and learning.

Come check them out if you’re at WPA!

CourseKata instructor and researcher Icy Zhang (UW–Madison) explores how embodied learning can help students make sense of abstract statistics concepts. In her recent blogpost, she highlights how simple physical interactions – like shuffling data or moving sampling distributions – can ground ideas like randomness and confidence intervals, and that the most effective approach may depend on students’ prior knowledge.

🔗 Read more: Beyond One-Size-Fits-All: How to Adapt Embodied Learning for Different Students (https://teachpsych.org/E-xcellence-in-Teaching-Blog/13596986)

Her work offers practical ideas for instructors looking to connect hands-on experiences with deeper statistical understanding in the classroom!

This week, Icy Zhang will present at the Symposium on Data Science and Statistics ( ) in Milwaukee!

She’ll share new CourseKata research (with collaborators Claudia Sutter, Yinqiu He, and Ji Son) examining how motivation, engagement, and performance unfold across introductory statistics courses, using real-time learning data from authentic classroom environments.

📍 Milwaukee, WI
🗓 May 1, 2026
⏰ 9:50–11:20 AM CT

🌟 Teacher Spotlight: Jeremy Trott

Jeremy has been teaching with CourseKata at UCLA for several years and values the way it brings together teaching, research, and continuous improvement. For him, one of the most powerful aspects of CourseKata is how closely classroom instruction is connected to ongoing research and curriculum development.

He especially appreciates that the textbook is not static, but evolves through collaboration between instructors and researchers. As he puts it, “The integration of pedagogy, research, teaching, and iterative improvements to the textbook is all incredibly unique and useful.” This partnership allows instructors to share insights from their own classrooms while helping shape materials that support student learning in meaningful ways.

Being part of that iterative process is something Jeremy finds especially rewarding. “I look forward to continuing to work with and improve the textbook over time through research and instruction,” he says.

Jeremy has also been an invaluable member of the CourseKata community – always willing to help us run classroom studies and contribute to ongoing improvement efforts. It’s clear how deeply he cares about his students and their learning. Thank you, Jeremy!

Join the CourseKata Fellowship to bring a modern statistics and data science course to your students - for free.

👉 Apply now: https://www.coursekata.org/news-announcements/2026-27-coursekata-fellowship-for-high-school-teachers