New Zealand Statistical Association Newsletter 58
September 2003
Statistics Education News
IASE Correspondent
NZSA Sponsorship for Delta ’03
Bevan Werry Memorial Prize
CensusAtSchool NZ
International News
Chris Wild is now the President of the International Association for Statistical Education (IASE). He was officially inducted at the recent 54
th International Statistical Institute (ISI) conference in Berlin.IASE has a number of forthcoming activities and is calling for participation. First, there is the IASE Research Round Table on "Curricular development in statistics education" at Lund, Sweden, 28 June to 3 July 2004. The Roundtable will bring together a small number of experts, representing as many different countries as possible, to discuss one another’s views and approaches to curriculum for teaching statistics. Mike Camden is on the Roundtable organising committee. Potential participants are invited to submit a three page summary of their paper by October 1, 2003. See conference web page: http://hobbes.lite.msu.edu/~IASE_2004_Roundtable.
Second, at the 10
th International Congress on Mathematics Education, July 4-11, 2004, Copenhagen, IASE is collaborating in the organisation of specific education activities. TSG 11: Research and development in the teaching and learning of probability and statistics will be organised by Jun Li, and Joseph W. Wisenbaker (Chairs), Dani Ben-Zvi, Manfred Borovcnick and Maxine Pfannkuch (Panel members). Those who are interested in offering a paper should contact team chairs: Jun Li (lijun@math.ecnu.edu.cn) or Joe Wisenbaker (joe@coe.uga.edu). Statistics education contributions are also acceptable in many other Topic Study and Discussion Groups as well as in Posters. More information is available from the web site http://www.icme-10.dk/.Third, Chris Wild is the IASE representative at the ISI Programme Co-ordinating Committee for ISI-55
th Session to be held in Sydney, Australia, April 5-12, 2005. He is also the Chair of the IASE Programme Committee, which is in charge of preparing a list of Invited Paper Meetings to be organised by the IASE alone or in co-operation with other ISI Sections, Committees and sister societies. The list of IASE Invited Papers will be available soon. For more information please contact Chris Wild at c.wild@auckland.ac.nz.Fourth, preparation for ICOTS-7, 2-7 July, 2006, Salvador, Brazil is already underway. Topic and topic convenors have been selected. John Harraway is the scientific secretary on the International Program Committee Executive. More information from Carmen Batenero at batenero@ugr.es.
Other activities of the IASE include the International Statistical Literacy Project (ISLP) and the IASE Statistical Education Research Journal (SERJ). The ISLP mission is to provide those interested in statistical literacy with information and resources and to aid them in the development of statistical literacy around the world. The ISLP web site is now fully operational at http://course1.winona.edu/cblumberg/islplist.htm. The fourth issue of SERJ will be published in November 2003. This is a joint publication of IASE and ISI and is free to everyone at http://fehps.une.edu.au/serj.
Details of IASE publications, including proceedings of past conferences, and IASE activities can be found on the IASE web site at http://www.cbs.nl/isi/iase.htm. If you want to be engaged in statistics education and want to support international collaboration in this area please join the Association. You can find information about membership at the IASE web page or from Chris Wild at c.wild@auckland.ac.nz.
Local News
New Zealanders recently attended the August 11-12, 2003 IASE Satellite Conference on Statistics Education and the Internet, Berlin. Rachel Cunliffe, Matt Regan, and Chris Wild presented a paper on "Flexible learning and large numbers (a case study)" wherein they described the methods they used to teach Stage One Statistics, including demonstrating their innovative CD-ROM. Many participants at the conference requested a copy of the CD-ROM. At the August 13-20, 2003 ISI-54th Biennial Session Berlin, Maxine Pfannkuch, Chris Wild, and John Harraway presented papers relating to statistics education.
Delta
’03 (Fourth Southern Hemisphere Conference on Undergraduate Mathematics Teaching) will be held in Queenstown from 23 to 27 November 2003. A statistics strand is being organised with Chris Wild as plenary speaker. For more information see: www.maths.otago.ac.nz/delta03.The Stage One Statistics Team, led by Chris Wild and Matt Regan, Dept of Statistics at University of Auckland were awarded a National Tertiary Teaching Excellence Award at Parliament in June.
The NZSA education committee, mainly through the efforts of Mike Camden, is continuing to represent its concern to appropriate ministerial bodies about the current developments in statistics education in the school sector.
Maxine Pfannkuch
The NZSA has approved a grant of $500 towards Prof Chris Wild’s expenses
at Delta ’03, and is an official conference sponsor (see
http://www.maths.otago.ac.nz/delta03/).
The NZ Association of Maths Teachers awards the role of "Bevan Werry Speaker" to a person who can make major contributions to mathematics education, by speaking at the NZAMT conference, and at meetings of the regional Maths Associations. This year's Bevan Werry Speaker is Harold Henderson. He gave an entertaining and very useful plenary talk at the July NZAMT8 conference in Hamilton, on data visualisation with Excel. Here's a note from the Conference website:
Harold is interested in data visualisation. Powerful new methods of data visualisation (dynamic graphics and trellis display), together with modern computing environments, have combined to produce a new frontier of data analysis. Visualisation tools provide deep insight into the structure of data. This approach to data analysis stresses the use of visualisation to thoroughly study the structure of data and to check the validity of statistical models fitted to data. Dynamic statistical graphics are now widely available in many statistical packages, and even in Excel. He will give examples of the use of data visualisation in statistical practice. Using such techniques, the internally assessed components of NCEA statistics can be presented by students in ways which are relevant, up-to-date and easy to understand.
Mike Camden
a statistical experience for school children…
This month saw the nationwide launch of CensusAtSchool NZ, an online survey for children to do at school as part of their Maths lessons. The project is educationally motivated and joins an international initiative which is based in the UK but has also happened in South Africa, Queensland, South Australia and is planned for Canada.
The New Zealand project is hosted by the Department of Statistics at the University of Auckland, coordinated by Megan Jowsey, HOD Maths at Birkenhead College, who has a one year NZ Science, Maths and Technology teacher fellowship awarded by the Royal Society of NZ. The publicity and web design is the work of Rachel Cunliffe of the Department of Statistics, with webserver technical work by James McGrail. The project has been supported by academic staff within the Department of Statistics, while Statistics NZ and the Ministry of Education have provided advice and guidance.
The project aims to involve children in the collection of real data that is relevant to their lives, so that hopefully their Statistics lessons will be more meaningful and interesting. The data will form part of the multivariate international data base and provide opportunities for children to compare themselves with their peers from within NZ and the other countries involved. Teaching resources, results and samples of raw data will be available to teachers and students once the census is complete.
In the first 3 weeks over 15,000 students from 350 schools have completed the survey and with 1 more week to go the projection is for over 20,000 children to be involved. The response from schools so far is very positive!! TVNZ have helped boost the participation rate with coverage on "Holmes". You can visit the CensusAtSchool web page at http://www.censusatschool.org.nz/.
Megan Jowsey