DISCUS-IS Research Blog  ·  Post 3 of 4  ·  Series: What Instructors Tell Us 

What Empathy Looks Like in a Statistics Classroom

How attentiveness to students’ experiences drives inclusive instructional decision-making — and why it can’t be scripted

DISCUS-IS Project Team  ·  NSF IUSE #2314358  ·  Tags: Empathy · UDL · Instructor development

Empathy is not a word that appears frequently in statistics education literature. It tends to live in the domains of counseling, social work, and interpersonal psychology — not in discussions of p-values and sampling distributions. But it emerged, unprompted and unmistakably, as a central theme in the video-stimulated recall interviews that form the basis of this research.

When two introductory statistics instructors at a neurodiversity-focused institution watched recordings of their own teaching and talked through the decisions they were making, what they described — again and again, in different language and from different angles — was responsiveness to their students’ emotional and cognitive experiences. The strategies varied. The underlying motivation did not. What we observed looked like empathy in action.

What the research says about instructor empathy

The higher education literature supports what the interviews suggested. Studies across a range of postsecondary contexts have found that instructor empathy is associated with stronger student self-efficacy, more positive course perceptions, and greater persistence in the face of difficulty (Darwin & Pinheiro, 2023; Meyers et al., 2019; Ross et al., 2022; Wilkins et al., 2021). In mathematics teacher education specifically, Lambert and colleagues (2021) identified empathy as the connective tissue between UDL and Design Thinking — the motivational core that transforms a framework into a practice.

The DISCUS-IS findings add a discipline-specific layer to this picture: in the postsecondary statistics classroom, empathy appears to shape not just the relational climate of the course but the specific instructional decisions instructors make — what they emphasize, what they remove, how they structure participation, and how they respond when things aren’t working.

Empathy as anticipation

Dr. Sara Young’s version of empathy is architectural. It shows up in decisions made before class begins:

“How many students just throw their hands up because it’s a calculation and they’re averse to it because they’ve had so many bad experiences?”

— Dr. Young, instructor participant

This question — asked rhetorically in a video-stimulated recall interview, while reflecting on a lesson design choice — is not a strategy. It is an act of imagination: picturing the student who has failed a math class, who carries that failure into this room, and asking what the instructional environment owes that student before they even raise their hand. The decision to deprioritize calculation in favor of conceptual reasoning follows from that imaginative act, not from a checklist item.

Dr. Young also described a deliberate choice to open every class session with a social question unrelated to statistics — asking students about their experiences as athletes or performers, or checking in about their week. She traced this practice to her participation in diversity and equity workshops: “Having the students see me as a human first helps to build that rapport and make sure they see the classroom as a safe place.” What began as an intuition has been refined over time into a consistent instructional structure grounded in an explicit theory of belonging.

Empathy as responsiveness

Instructor Ian Jackson’s version of empathy is more improvisational. It surfaces in moments:

“There was one time when I was like having a really rough week and wasn’t paying attention to my classes and stuff and he came over to me and asked if I knew what I was doing. And I just had to be honest. I said, “Absolutely not.” And he was like, “OK, here’s exactly what you do.” And I was like, OK I can ask a question and not get judged for it.”

— Nathan, student participant

Nathan’s account describes an instructor reading a student, noticing something that wasn’t right, and responding without judgment. Jackson himself described his motivating tension plainly: “I try to help them without saying you’re not good and embarrassing them.” That tension — between the desire to support and the risk of exposing — is one that any instructor who has thought carefully about participation has felt. Jackson’s resolution of it is not a technique. It is relational attunement.

Student Oscar Escalante described a related moment: Jackson’s practice of providing reassurance not just individually but to the whole class before each assignment, quiz, and exam. “He reassured not just me, but the whole class, like all of us. On each scenario, each exploration, each homework assignment, each quiz, each midterm.” What reads to the observer as a classroom management habit is experienced by the student as a personal form of care.

Empathy and the evolution of teaching

Both instructors described their teaching as having changed over time, and both traced that change to greater attention to students. Jackson reflected on his years-long adjustment to the shift from consensus statistics to simulation-based inference: “I am convinced now that the old way is not good for 2024.” His language is about students and their fit with the curriculum — not about the curriculum itself. The curriculum is what got updated because the students’ needs shifted.

Young described a more gradual evolution in how she uses student ideas: “Now I feel like there’s much more of an interplay between what they’re saying and what I’m noticing about what they’re saying, and how that relates to what I’m hoping they get out of the lesson. That I’m intentionally reacting to what they say.” The word “intentionally” matters here. Empathy in this classroom is not passive; it is an active mode of attention that shapes real-time instructional decisions.

What this means for instructors thinking about inclusive design

The finding that empathy — rather than strategy adoption — appears to be the driving mechanism of inclusive instructional practice has implications for how we support instructors who want to teach more equitably. Professional development focused on strategy transmission may be less generative than professional development that creates structured opportunities for instructors to observe their own teaching and articulate the reasoning behind their decisions.

This is, notably, exactly what video-stimulated recall interviews do. Both instructors in this study described the experience of watching themselves teach and being asked to explain their choices as illuminating in ways that professional reading and workshop attendance had not been. The final post in this series will say more about how instructors might pursue this kind of reflective practice with a trusted colleague.

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Part of the “What Instructors Tell Us” series · DISCUS-IS Project · NSF IUSE #2314358