Anna Fergusson
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annafergusson.bsky.social
Anna Fergusson
@annafergusson.bsky.social
100 followers 85 following 21 posts
Statistics & data science education researcher
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annafergusson.bsky.social
⭐New issue of Statistics Education Research Journal!
📝Secondary teachers’ attitudes toward teaching probability
📝Preservice teachers interpreting students’ probability thinking
📝Grade 6 students on measures of central tendency
📝VR for enhancing data literacy
📖Read the articles: iase-pub.org/ojs/SERJ
Statistics Education Research Journal banner with IASE logo
November 9, 2025 at 9:16 PM
annafergusson.bsky.social
I had a great time at #USCOTS (United States Conference on Teaching Statistics) earlier this month, attending in person for the first time. I was also grateful to give the keynote for the research satellite, about how I am trying to navigate the sea of statistics and data science education research.
An image of me in a boat with a cat, a laptop with the R logo, and the NZ flag, sailing through the sea, representing the outline of the talk that focused on where to travel, what route to take, who to travel with, how to spend my time, how to fund my travel and what photos to share.
July 30, 2025 at 9:04 PM
annafergusson.bsky.social
A couple of days ago, because I was writing a chapter on probability modelling, I tried asking for the meaning of "sayings" that started with "As random as a ...... ". Um, yeah .....
The idiom "as random as a couch" is an informal way to express that something is completely unpredictable and has no discernible pattern or logic. It suggests that the situation or behavior is without any rhyme or reason, like the placement of furniture in a living room. Here's a breakdown: "As random as..." This phrase establishes the comparison, suggesting that something is as haphazard and without order as whatever comes after "as". "Couch": In this context, "couch" (or sofa) is not about a specific piece of furniture. It represents the lack of structure and order. People might place a couch in various random locations, seemingly without a specific design plan. "As random as a couch" implies that something is just as disorganized and unpredictable as the placement of a couch in a room, which can be arbitrarily chosen without a clear pattern. The idiom is used to describe situations, events, or even behaviors that are chaotic, haphazard, and difficult to understand. It suggests that there's no apparent logic behind what's happening.
April 24, 2025 at 9:07 AM
annafergusson.bsky.social
Maybe I should feature more dogs than cats in my research? Because my paper on using grayscale photos (of dogs) to introduce reasoning with digital image data won the 2024 ASA Jackie Dietz Journal of Statistics and Data Science Education Best Paper Award 🎉 www.tandfonline.com/journals/ujs...
Various grayscale photos of dogs on the left hand side, with dot plots on the right hand side showing the distribution of grayscale pixels for each photo.
April 17, 2025 at 2:47 AM
annafergusson.bsky.social
If only it was a perfect straight line ...
A plot of the log of the number of stones versus the blink number for my input for day 11 of advent of code, looks like a straight line but it's not quite.
December 12, 2024 at 1:16 AM
annafergusson.bsky.social
I'm trying to finish my slides for a CAUSE webinar on using grayscale photos to introduce high school teachers to reasoning with digital image data (www.causeweb.org/cause/webina...), but my cat is not giving consent for his image to be used - lucky he can't read the paper! #statsed #datascied
A black and white cat walking over a laptop, with a slide from a talk showing on the screen which shows a grayscale photo of the same cat
December 9, 2024 at 3:18 AM
annafergusson.bsky.social
Six years ago, I had just finished the first semester of designing and teaching a new intro statistics and data science course. One of the many new teaching activities I created was one using grayscale photos to introduce and reinforce concepts related to data distributions.

🐱 🐶 📊 💻
A photo of a cat in colour and then in grayscale, with four plots showing the distribution of grayscale pixels for increasing sample sizes.
June 17, 2024 at 9:56 PM
annafergusson.bsky.social
OK, found some time to play! ❤️❤️ Something is a bit "shady" about the guess the shaded area game 😀Sometimes the pale yellow shade doesn't show up (see screenshot from console). I can't work out what I am supposed to do for the geom game 😹😹😹
December 6, 2023 at 10:38 PM