Lee Kucera

“I like to tie complex concepts to real-world issues and problems … to make the content more accessible, interesting, and useful for students.”

Teaching Statistics

Lee Kucera has been a statistics lecturer at UC Irvine since 2015. “I retired from high school teaching as the mathematics department chair at Capistrano Valley High School in Mission Viejo, where I taught Advanced Placement (AP) Statistics and International Baccalaureate (IB) Math Studies.” She has been a College Board consultant since 2001, presenting at both weekend workshops and summer training institutes for AP statistics teachers throughout the United States and internationally.

Assessing and Developing Educational Materials

Kucera reviews statistics textbooks and review materials for several major publishers, Kahn Academy, and the College Board. She wrote curriculum materials for Texas Instruments for use with their graphing calculators and recently revised the statistical software and graphing calculator appendix for the new edition of Stats, Modeling the World. “When developing my course curriculum, I like to tie complex concepts to real-world issues, and problems — such as voting, ecology and product testing — to make the content more accessible, interesting, and useful for students.”

Survey Research and Polling

Kucera is a member of the American Statistical Association and has had students enter and win both local and national recognition in their student competitions. Her interest in statistics is not only in the area of education but also survey research and polling. “My fascination with polling began as a graduate student at UCLA with a poll I ran during the 1970 mid-term election (right before 18-year-olds got the vote) and continues through today with issues such as social desirability bias and overall political polling difficulties.”

Education

Ph.D., Math Education, University of Vermont, 1998

M.A., Secondary Education, University of San Francisco, 1979

A.B., Graduate Work: Psychology, Math, Higher Education, UCLA, 1971

Teaching

Stats 7 (Basic Statistics)