Nathaniel Woodward is a lecturer in the Department of Statistics and Data Sciences.
Tell us about yourself—educational background, working experiences, etc.:
I was born in Dallas and went to high school in Keller, TX, (a suburb of Ft. Worth) where I met my wife junior year in a program called Academic Decathlon (to which I owe my love of learning). I went off to Reed College in Portland, OR, while she followed a better scholarship to Washington, DC. I held many odd jobs in college, including making smoothies, apprenticing as an electrician, serving as a reference assistant in my college library, and doing groundskeeping/landscaping.
We persevered with the long-distance thing (and got to know two really cool cities along the way!); she graduated early and moved to Portland, where we promptly began acquiring cats (we are up to 3 now). I ended up majoring in Biology, but I got hooked on education through exam-prep tutoring, and after a temporary high school teaching position, I resolved to study the science of learning full-time. With the goal of making class-time more efficient, I came to UT to pursue a PhD in Educational Psychology in 2013, but got distracted by all of the amazing, fun classes in SDS (formerly SSC) and ended up earning my MS in Statistics in 2016. I taught my first class for SDS in 2017 and I loved it so much, I decided to stay on after finishing my doctorate in 2018.
What led you to choose Statistics as your field?
I have taught almost everything, but mathematics is my cherished subject (statistics in particular). Here’s why: From the time I had to memorize my times tables until I went off to college, I thought that math was boring. Never once was I excited by or interested in the subject, which to me meant repetitive calculations, unexplained formulas, and tedious rules. In college, I ended up in math courses that showed me the pure enjoyment of mathematics for the first time in my life—not formulas to be memorized for a test, but concepts that have been changing the world since antiquity and can fundamentally expand the way you think forever!
Why statistics? Statistical thinking is a skill that everyone needs but that very few actually have. The information age is bringing about a second Reformation: in the first, the printing press enabled individuals to draw conclusions based on their own reading. Literacy, a skill once reserved for learned monks, became a skill for everyone, breaking the Church’s monopoly on meaning. Today, we’re up to our ears in data and it’s all just a click away: now it is numeracy that is needed to democratize meaning! Our newspapers are filled not just with text, but with numbers and statistics which have become indispensable to society in countless ways: science, engineering, business, medicine... But as numbers have become the final arbiter in questions of truth, statistics has increasingly become the province of an expert few, a latter-day College of Cardinals. It is our duty as researchers and educators to redress this: My constant goal is to empower students to value statistical thinking and make use of it in their daily lives as informed, numerically savvy citizens!
Tell us about a project or piece of reseach you have worked on while attending UT. How would you describe your specific research to someone outside your field?
In my research, I aim to understand basic principles of human learning and to apply these principles to educational problems, such as optimizing retention and transfer in the classroom. However, I am still very excited about my dissertation research, so I will tell you about that! I explored over 1000 large undergraduate courses at UT to see what course features predict students’ success in subsequent courses whose material builds directly upon the first (i.e., the first course is a prerequisite for the second). To do this, I have mined course syllabi for information about course structure, teaching practices, learning activities, and communication to students. A key hypothesis was that frequent spaced retrieval practice (e.g., cumulative quizzing) would improve students’ performance in their subsequent courses compared to having a small number of high-stakes exams. This was explored using propensity-score weighted multi-level regression models, which converged on a small, positive causal effect estimate. What’s more, exploratory variable-selection methods revealed that other factors, including cumulative exams and number of quizzes, were also related to students’ future success!
Congratulations on recieveing your PhD! What do you plan on doing next?
I plan on improving my own teaching and becoming more involved in the department! Teaching is what led me to pursue learning research in the first place, and nothing brings me greater joy than empowering students to become effective learners and careful thinkers so they can achieve what they want in life (and learn so much along the way)! Teaching statistics is my true passion and I am thrilled to get to do it for a living. I believe that many “advanced” statistical topics can be made accessible to students earlier on, exposing them to tantalizing ideas (bootstrapping, latent variables, MCMC, FFT, SVD) while preparing them for a computation-driven world. I am thrilled to be able to pursue a career that I find so meaningful, and I would love nothing more than continue to refine my teaching and to inspire students toward the pursuit of knowledge and truth for its own sake!
What is a talent you have always wanted?
As a juggler, the talent you always want is to be able to juggle more balls than you currently can. I’d be thrilled to master the 7-ball cascade someday!
What is your favorite book?
I think it would have to be The Recognitions by William Gaddis, one of the few books I returned to repeatedly over the years. I’ve got a thing for mysterious, larger-than-life characters who appear to have access to secret truths and Wyatt—the central figure—is on a different plane of existence altogether. Don’t read the Franzen review (he “loved it,” but his take, like much of his writing, is lame); rather, to see if you might like to take it on, read William Gass’s introduction (in the Penguin 20th Century Classics edition).
If I’m going to call The Recognitions “my favorite,” then Suttree by Cormac McCarthy is an impossibly close number two. The writing in both of these books is astonishingly beautiful.
Favorite food?
Hmm, so I would have had a totally different answer last week, but over the weekend I went to El Meson (on South Lamar) with my in-laws and had my mind blown by their ancho chili relleno: I’ve been raving about it ever since to anyone who will listen.
