Patricia Buchanan

Biography

Patricia Buchannan is an Associate Teaching Professor of Statistics at Penn State.

She received her M.A. in Statistics from Penn State University in 1988. She received a M.S. in Physiology in 1987 from Penn State University and a B.S. in Chemistry and Biology in 1978 from Lock Haven University.

Buchanan has a keen interest in STEM and statistical education research with a special interest in pedagogy and assessment. She is also interested in general education reform.

Buchanan has contributed the development of Statistics 200 as an instructor and currently serves as associate teaching professor. She has worked closely with other faculty in her department to implement a simulation-based inference curriculum in Statistics 200 effective Fall 2017. She joined Penn State as an instructor in 1989. She participated in a National Science Foundation project where students took Pretest and Posttest (attitudes and knowledge) tests to compare the traditional and simulation-based inference curriculum.

She has worked closely with both the Center for Excellence and Education (CESE) and the Schreyer Institute for Teaching Excellence (SITE) to both improve and advance her teaching. She is currently working on a Tombros project to incorporate constructed response into Statistics 200. She is also heavily involved with teaching and supervising graduate students when serving in roles of teaching assistants and instructors of record. She has served on two invited panels at national conferences to promote her work with these graduate students.

Honors and Awards

C.I. Noll Award for Excellence in Teaching, Eberly College of Science Alumni Society, Pennsylvania State University, 2017

Teaching

STAT 100 - Statistical Concepts and Reasoning

STAT 200 - Elementary Statistics

STAT 460 - Intermediate Applied Statistics

STAT 462/STAT 501 - Applied Regression Analysis

STAT 464 - Applied Nonparametrics

STAT 480 - Statistical Packages

STAT 592 - Teaching Statistics