Milo A Schield

Professor Emeritus

CB 315
schield@augsburg.edu

Milo Schield has been at Augsburg since 1985. He founded the MIS program at Augsburg and took it to be the seventh largest major within six years. He served as the chair of the Department of Business Administration for three years.

Earning a physics degree from Iowa State University, an M.S. in physics from the University of Illinois, and a Ph.D. in space physics from Rice University, Schield worked on the Apollo project at North American Aviation and on satellite data analysis at the University of Iowa. After starting several businesses, he worked as a management consultant for a national CPA firm and as an operations analyst at the St. Paul Insurance Companies before coming to Augsburg.

At Augsburg he has taught courses in MIS at the undergraduate level and taught courses in critical thinking and statistics at the undergraduate and graduate levels.

Schield pioneered in the development of statistical literacy.  In 1995, he first introduced statistical literacy in the Department of Business Administration. In 1998, he introduced Statistical Literacy for majors in the humanities. In 2005, he produced a statistical literacy textbook that has been used by hundreds of students.  He has written 70 papers on statistical literacy and given more than a hundred talks with 34 of these in 17 countries outside the US.

In 2001, Augsburg University received a $500,000 grant from the W. M. Keck Foundation “to develop statistical literacy as an interdisciplinary curriculum in the liberal arts.” In his book, More Damned Lies and Statistics, author Joel Best noted, “a small educational movement advocating statistical literacy is emerging. Dr. Milo Schield, director of the W. M. Keck Statistical Literacy project at Augsburg College in Minneapolis, is the movement’s leading voice.”

Dr. Schield is an elected member of the International Statistical Institute, the US representative of the International Statistical Literacy Project, a Past-President of the local chapter of the American Statistical Association and a Board Member of the National Numeracy Network. He is the web master of www.StatLit.org. This site had more than 360,000 downloads and 260,000 visits in 2014; it has been Google rated as the #1 site for statistical literacy for the past ten years.

Education

  • B.S. Iowa State University
  • M.S. University of Illinois
  • Ph.D. Rice University
  • Postgraduate studies in Philosophy

Publications

Statistical Literacy

(See www.statlit.org)

Conceptual Literacy:

Scientific

  • “A Source for Field-Aligned Currents at Auroral Latitudes”
  • “Drift of Non-Interacting Charged Particles in a Simple Geomagnetic Field”
  • “Electron Observation Between the Plasma Sheet and the Plasmasphere”