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New Zealand Statistical Association Newsletter 68

September 2008

NZSA Education Committee
Education News
Stats Education DVD

The Education Committee has had a full and active twenty-second year, including meetings every two months. Early in the year, Sharleen Forbes announced her withdrawal, which comes after 21.5 years of membership. We hope that this withdrawal is reversible! We thank Sharleen for her great contributions of expertise over those years, and for being a large part in founding the Committee. We also would like to extend our congratulations to Sharleen both on getting the Campbell award, and on being given life membership of the Association for her contributions in statistical education and beyond.

A highly successful Education Day was held at the recent annual conference. Teachers from as far away as Auckland and Tauranga attended. Sharleen Forbes gave the plenary session. Four presentations followed, on innovative teaching resources, informal inference, data exploration for the rock wren, and achievement in NCEA. Overall, they gave the message that statistics is accessible and useful for students, and that methods for delivering it are rapidly developing. The afternoon held a series of four workshops, with all of these being presented by members of the Education Committee.

The Curriculum for the final level at school now contains: ‘make inferences from surveys and experiments … using methods such as resampling and randomisation to assess the strength of evidence’. These methods arose in several contexts at the Education Day. Is NZ mad to have these in school, or just way out in front?
The committee has been steadily moving away from being just a Wellington-based group to being far more nationally representative. The next obvious region to recruit committee members from is Christchurch, as the teleconference facilities, so kindly made available by Statistics New Zealand, are available there. This would be particularly advantageous, with NZAMT 2011 being held in Christchurch. Christchurch is also the current hub of NZAMT, and this also presents a significant opportunity for closer liaison with them. A wider input from Statistics New Zealand would also enrich the committee.

Bridging the gap between teachers and statisticians is a crucial challenge for the committee. We now have some active classroom teachers on the committee, but would appreciate more of them to be involved.
Mike participated in the Western Australia Mathematics (Teachers’) Association conference in August. Teachers there as here are increasingly aware that ‘Chance and Data’ (aka probability and statistics) is accessible and in fact essential for school students. It seems that students value it, not because they perceive it as easy, but because they perceive it as relevant. The next generations of adults there and here may be much better at using and assessing evidence for decisions.

Curriculum Project

The committee has had a major ongoing focus on contributing to the new curriculum for primary and secondary schools. Now that the new curriculum is in place, the committee has been working alongside the Ministry of Education to help provide input into, and review of, supplementary support materials for the curriculum. This will include more detailed “Tier Two” materials to further develop ideas more briefly covered in the curriculum, as well as a glossary of mathematical terms. Our curriculum is the envy of many other countries, and is one we can be proud of.

NCEA and Scholarship

We continue making submissions about and reviewing the achievement standards relating to NCEA. Our request to NZQA and MoE to be involved in the review of these standards has been well received. The standards are currently being revised, with NZAMT leading the revision. The committee intends to take a very active role in this. The Ministry is also keen for the committee to review and comment on the standards as they are under production. This is in addition to being supportive for the committee’s input into the materials for the NCEA or scholarship assessments.
The redesign of the NCEA Achievement Standard, and the Unit Standards, in Statistics, is vitally important. The advances that NZ has made with the Curriculum will succeed only if they emerge in the country’s assessments.

Upcoming Conferences

• NZAMT 2009: The Association continues to give support to this biennial conference by providing funds for a plenary speaker. The aim is to give an ongoing presence for statistics in this forum. At the 2007 conference at St Cuthbert's College, Auckland in late September, our sponsored plenary speaker was Maxine Pfannkuch. The committee is actively pursuing names for the 2009 speaker. We would like to encourage all statisticians, especially those in the central and southern parts of the North Island, to consider offering talks or workshops at the 2009 conference at Palmerston North.
  
  MERGA 2009: Next year’s Mathematics Education Research Group of Australasia meets next July in Wellington. Again it would be good to see the statistics community presenting at this in significant numbers (hopefully at above the 5% level).
  

Alex Neill, Mike Camden.

International News

Joint ICMI/IASE Study, Statistics Education in School Mathematics: Challenges for Teaching and Teacher Education. The International Commission on Mathematics Instruction (ICMI) and IASE ran a very successful joint study focused on statistics education research in June 2008 in Monterrey, Mexico. Carmen Batenero was chair of the International Programme Committee of the joint study. Pip Arnold, Maxine Pfannkuch (The University of Auckland) and Tim Burgess (Massey University) from New Zealand presented papers. Proceedings from this study can be downloaded.

ICME (International Congress on Mathematical Education). At this conference in Monterrey, Mexico, 6-13 July 2008, there were two topic studies groups on research and development in the teaching and learning of statistics and probability. The statistics papers and the probability papers can be downloaded. New Zealand was well represented in the statistics topic with John Harraway (Otago University), Pip Arnold, Maxine Pfannkuch, and Gillian Frankcom-Burgess (The University of Auckland) presenting papers.

OZCOTS 2008 - 6th Australian Conference on Teaching Statistics. This conference was held in Melbourne in July. The focus of the conference was on learning, teaching, and assessing tertiary statistics. There was an international line up of invited speakers including Chris Wild (The University of Auckland). Many other New Zealanders contributed to the conference: Murray Black (AUT), Doug Stirling, Siva Ganesh (Massey University), Nathaniel Pihama (SNZ)

CensusAtSchool - Second International Workshop. CensusAtSchool is an international attempt to increase statistical literacy of students by providing exciting activities that are closely aligned to each country's school curriculum. The group met in Los Angeles in July 2008 at the UCLA. Chris Wild and Pip Arnold presented a well-received talk about "CensusAt School NZ: a Means to Many Ends" and Pip Arnold also ran an innovative workshop on "Growing Scatterplots".

USCOTS 2009 - United States Conference on Teaching Statistics, June 2009, Ohio State University. Similar to the Australian OZCOTS, this conference is focusing on undergraduate level statistics education, targeting statistics teachers. Chris Wild is a plenary speaker.

The Sixth International Forum on Statistical Reasoning, Thinking and Literacy. This Forum will be held in Brisbane 10-16 July, 2009. The topic under study will be the role of context and evidence in informal inferential reasoning. Initial proposals have already been sought. For more information see: http://srtl.stat.auckland.ac.nz/srtl6/research_forums.

Sixth IASE Satellite Conference, South Africa, August 2009. This conference will be held before the ISI-57 Conference. The theme of the conference is Next Steps in Statistics Education, with a focus on tertiary statistics teaching. Deadline for submission of papers is 30th November 2008. For more information see: http://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/~iase/conferences.php.

The Eighth International Conference on Teaching Statistics will be held in Slovenia, 11-16 July 2010. John Harraway (Otago University) is Chair of the International Programme committee. There is a stunning list of plenary speakers for this conference (Hans Rosling, Gerd Gigerenzer, Cliff Konold, Jessica Utts, Anuska Ferligoj) and a plenary panel coordinated by Chris Wild. If you want to contribute to any of the topic sessions please indicate your interest now to the topic convenors (See: http://icots8.org/).

Local News

NZSA Conference Education Day, Waikato University. On the 2nd September 2008, 30 teachers from Auckland, Waikato and Bay of Plenty attended a strand of the conference, which focused specifically on statistics education in secondary schools. The keynote address was given by Sharleen Forbes (Statistics New Zealand). Contributed talks in the morning session were given by John Harraway (University of Otago), Maxine Pfannkuch (University of Auckland), Ian Westbrooke (Department of Conservation), Rolf Turner (STARPath, University of Auckland). In the afternoon session, partcipants chose from workshops offered by Mike Camden (Statistics New Zealand), Pip Arnold, (Team Solutions University of Auckland) and Maxine Pfannkuch (University of Auckland).

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