Welcome to my personal website. Prior to academia, I worked in the medical device industry as a Statistician for 8 years before earning my PhD in Statistics Education at the University of Minnesota (advisors: Joan Garfield & Robert delMas) where I had previously earned an MS in Statistics (advisor: Douglas Hawkins). At Penn State, I lead a Statistics & Data Science Education Research Lab in the Department of Statistics (jointly with Neil Hatfield) and served as Director of Undergraduate Programs for the Statistics Department. My primary research interests are oriented toward Statistics and Data Science Education, particularly with respect to assessment development and practice. I'm currently PI for NSF:IUSE Project CLASSIFIES--which seeks to develop and investigate tools that leverage NLP to assist STEM instructors in large-enrollment classes with providing student feedback on short-answer tasks, as well as PI for a related research project funded by the Penn State Center for Socially Responsible Artificial Intelligence studying influence of linguistic diversity on LLM tool development for educational use.
In addition to university service, I have a passion for supporting the wider statistics education community. In 2021, I joined the Consortium for the Advancement of Undergraduate Statistics Education (CAUSE) as co-Associate Director for Research (jointly with Laura Le at University of Minnesota), and was appointed as Executive Director in 2024. I'm also an Associate Editor for the Statistics Education Research Journal, chair of the local organizing committee for the 14th International Research Forum on Statistical Thinking, Reasoning, and Literacy (SRTL-14; State College PA), and a program committee member and Topic Chair for the 12th International Conference on Teaching Statistics (ICOTS-12; Brisbane, Australia).
I very much enjoy teaching a variety of courses including introductory statistics, R programming, the (undergraduate) senior capstone, and a graduate seminar on Statistics & Data Science Education Research. Although, I'm currently on sabbatical visiting the University of Auckland (NZ) until summer 2025. My goals on sabbatical include investing in long term collaborations with colleagues at U of A, observing cutting-edge active learning practices implemented in large introductory classes, collecting writing samples from New Zealand students to augment our data for NLP tool development research. I'm also honored to have been named the 2025 Visiting Lecturer by the New Zealand Statistical Association (stats.org.nz/nzsa-visiting-lecturers) which includes a national speaking tour at NZ universities sponsored by the NZSA.
For additional information about me and my work, please visit the following:
Contact Information
Matthew D. Beckman, PhD
Associate Research Professor
Department of Statistics
Pennsylvania State University
461 Pollock Road
University Park, PA 16802
