From Answer Generators to Thinking Partners: Scaffolded LLM Tutors in Statistics Education
Joint Statistical Meetings, Boston, MA, August 6, 2026. Session: AI in the Classroom: Research and Exploration.
Department of Mathematics · CSU Bakersfield
Leadership and service
I have been at CSU Bakersfield since 2023. Most of what follows is infrastructure rather than scholarship: a Hub with a room and machines in it, a colloquium series that brings outside researchers to campus, coordination of MATH 1209 and MATH 2200, a proposed degree, a faculty research group, and the research computing the rest of it depends on.
The common thread is straightforward — students and colleagues at CSUB should be able to do serious statistical and AI work here, with the tools and the people that requires.
Programs
Programs and appointments
Founded, organized and coordinated at CSUB-
2025 – present
CSUB Hub for Statistics, Applied AI & Data Science Innovation
I founded the Hub and lead it. It is an interdisciplinary home for statistics, applied AI, data science, student research, research computing, and cross-disciplinary collaboration at CSUB. Two things had to exist first: a physical space, which the Hub now has, and computing infrastructure that undergraduate and faculty research can actually run on, which I developed.
Hub on LinkedIn -
2025 – present
Statistics, Applied AI & Data Science Colloquium Series
I founded and organize an interdisciplinary colloquium series that brings external researchers and professionals to CSUB to engage students and faculty in statistics, data science, AI, scientific computing, and applied research. The colloquia so far:
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November 2025
Thomas A. DeFanti
CENIC AIR and the National Research Platform
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April 2026
Bhash Abeysinghe
American Institutes for Research — AI, NLP, and agentic systems
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10 September 2026
Emma Yates and Anna Winter
NASA Ames / BAER — Ozone Where We Live, community-based air-quality monitoring in California. Emma Yates is the OWWL project principal investigator; Anna Winter leads data science and sensor calibration.
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2026 – present
Statistics Coordinator, Department of Mathematics
I coordinate MATH 1209: Statistics in the Modern World and MATH 2200: Introduction to Statistical Concepts and Methods across multiple sections — course expectations, content coverage, shared resources, instructor support, and communication.
For both courses I developed a shared instructional system: course materials, R resources, assignments, assessments, classroom activities, projects, and browser-based statistical computing through CSUB JupyterHub, shared across sections.
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2026 – present
CSUB AI & Data Science Research Group
A cross-departmental faculty research group connecting statistics, computer science, artificial intelligence, institutional research, and related areas. I organize the research meetings and support collaborative projects, student involvement, and grant opportunities.
Curriculum
Degree programs and new courses
With Statistics and Mathematics faculty-
Degree
Statistical Data Science concentration, and a proposed B.S.
I work with Statistics and Mathematics faculty on CSUB’s Statistical Data Science curriculum: the existing concentration, and the current effort to develop a standalone B.S. in Statistical Data Science. My contributions cover degree requirements, prerequisite structure, elective pathways, comparisons with programs at other universities, student-demand survey analysis, and proposal development.
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MATH 4230
Applied Statistical Methods for Data Science
Co-developed with Statistics faculty as an upper-division applied statistics and data science course; I taught it in Spring 2026. I built that implementation — syllabus, instructional materials, computational labs, assessments, and an open-ended capstone centered on real data, reproducible workflows, and statistical communication — using R, Python, JupyterHub, and structured approaches to responsible AI use. I took part in the 2026 National Workshop on Data Science Education at UC Berkeley to benchmark the course and the wider curriculum.
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MATH 3218
The Science of Data, Statistics, and Artificial Intelligence
I participated in the faculty review and refinement of this new upper-division GE course, led by Dr. Eduardo Montoya, and served as the named proposer responsible for entering and advancing the proposal through CourseLeaf.
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Proposal
Inside AI: The Mathematics of Large Language Models
A proposed lower-division Area 2 course (Mathematical Concepts & Quantitative Reasoning) that teaches mathematics and statistics through the inner workings of modern language models: tokens, embeddings, vectors and matrices, attention, probability, sampling, uncertainty, numerical precision, quantization, model size, and statistical evaluation. The concept adapts hands-on small-model teaching ideas I encountered through Eric Van Dusen’s UC Berkeley and NWDSE materials to a mathematics-and-statistics GE setting. I developed the initial proposal and course material.
Infrastructure
Research computing and AI infrastructure
2025 – presentI contribute to the research-computing infrastructure supporting statistics, data science, and AI research at CSUB, including the connection to the National Research Platform / Nautilus ecosystem for GPU and high-performance computing.
I also take part in CSUB’s AWS Cloud & AI initiative as a faculty collaborator and project team member, contributing statistical evaluation and benchmarking, curriculum-integration ideas, and student-training plans. The collaborative CSUB project was awarded $200,000 in AWS cloud credits in 2026.
Training
AI and data science workshops
2025 – presentI have developed and delivered a sustained program of workshops, seminars, and training activities on responsible and useful applications of generative AI in teaching and research. Selected sessions include Teaching With AI: Helping Students Learn Statistics With Custom GPTs and Prompts, AI as a Thinking Partner in Statistics, and Effective Ways to Introduce AI in Your Classroom at CSUB.
I have also developed course-specific AI tutoring approaches to support mathematical and statistical reasoning, and contributed to broader campus AI activities, including OpenAI University Day at CSUB.
Service
Professional, university, department and community
Professional
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2026 – present
Member, ADSA AI Tutoring Study Working Group
Alliance for Data Science and AI — a multi-institution working group examining AI tutoring and AI-supported learning in statistics and data science education.
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2026 – 2027
Mentor, ASA Section on Statistics and Data Science Education (SSDSE) Mentoring Program
American Statistical Association.
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2026
Program Committee Member and Reviewer
Artificial Intelligence × Humanities, Education, and Art (AIxHEART) 2026.
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2026
Reviewer
IEEE International Conference on Tools with Artificial Intelligence (ICTAI).
University
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2026 – 2027
Academic Affairs Committee (AAC), Academic Senate
Appointed member of the university standing committee concerned with academic policy, programs, curricula, and related academic matters.
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May 2026 – May 2027
General Education Curriculum Committee (GECCo)
Elected by acclamation as a Mathematics/NSME representative to complete an existing term.
Department
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2026 – present
Founding Faculty Advisor, CSUB Data Science & Applied AI Society
Recruited the founding student officers and guided development and registration of the new student organization.
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2024 – 2025
Mathematics Department Website Subcommittee
Member; coordinated collection of faculty and staff information and distributed the departmental faculty/staff webpage survey.
Outreach and community engagement
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March 2026
Co-Organizer, Data Science Exploration Challenge, Lee Webb Math Field Day
Developed a new high-school data science competition, including the dataset, data dictionary, participant materials, judging framework, school communication, and event implementation.
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2025, 2026
Volunteer, Kern County Chapter MATHCOUNTS Competition
Supported competition operations and student activities, including scoring support.
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March 2026
Volunteer, Future ’Runner Day / Meet Your Major
Represented Mathematics in prospective-student and family outreach.
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October 2025
Volunteer, NSME Open House
Represented the Mathematics Department to prospective students and families.
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March 2025
Faculty Volunteer, Math Club Runner Night
Speaking
Conference and invited presentations
2021 – 2026Conference presentations
Prompt-Engineered Cognitive Apprenticeship for In-Service K–9 Teacher Learning
Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), Los Angeles, CA, 2026. Roundtable presentation.
Scaffolded Socratic Tutoring with a Retrieval-Augmented Mistral LLM for Psychology Laboratory Courses
IEEE AIxHEART, Laguna Hills, CA, 2025.
Computer-Aided Instruction for K–12 Teachers
IEEE AIxHEART, Laguna Hills, CA, 2025.
Work-in-Progress: Structured AI Tutoring in Engineering Education
ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference, Nashville, TN, 2025.
Hybrid LSTM Deep Learning Model for Forecasting Influenza-Like Illnesses
Contributed paper, Infectious Disease Epidemiology Section, Joint Statistical Meetings, Nashville, TN, 2025.
The Multiplicative Factor Multi-Frequency Exponential GARCH ((MF)²-EGARCH)
Contributed paper, Business and Economic Statistics Section, Joint Statistical Meetings, Washington, DC, 2022.
The Asymmetric Hyperbolic Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroscedastic (A-HYGARCH) Model
Contributed speed presentation, Time Series and Finance session, Joint Statistical Meetings, virtual, 2021.
Invited presentations, seminars and workshops
ELEVATE: Enhancing Learning Experiences Via AI Techniques — Findings from CSUB
Invited presentation and panel, AI in Education Day, National Workshop on Data Science Education, University of California, Berkeley, June 24, 2025.
Build Your AI Teaching Assistant
Session lead, NextTech Kern, CSU Bakersfield, October 2, 2025.
AI in Business
Session lead, NextTech Kern, CSU Bakersfield, October 2, 2025.
AI as a Thinking Partner in Statistics: Results from Spring and Fall 2025
Mathematics Seminar, CSU Bakersfield, November 5, 2025.
Accelerate Your Intelligence
Panelist, CSU Bakersfield, November 20, 2025.
AI Workshop for First-Year Seminar Students and Course Coordinators
Faculty training workshop, CSU Bakersfield, October 13, 2025.
Teaching and Learning in the AI Era
NSME Teacher-Scholar Summer Workshop, CSU Bakersfield, August 19, 2025.
Hands-On AI Workshop: Custom GPTs and Effective Prompt Engineering for Educators
Invited talk, NSME Teacher-Scholar Lecture Series, CSU Bakersfield, April 11, 2025.
Teaching With AI: Helping Students Learn Statistics With Custom GPTs and Prompts
Mathematics Seminar, CSU Bakersfield, April 2, 2025.
Effective Ways to Introduce AI in Your Classroom at CSUB
NSME Teacher-Scholar Lecture Series, CSU Bakersfield, March 6, 2025.
The rest of the record
Courses and student research are on the teaching page, papers and preprints on the publications page, and the complete record in the CV.