International News

USCOTS 2009 – United States Conference on Teaching Statistics 25-27 June 2009, Ohio State University.

This conference focused on undergraduate level statistics education, targeting statistics teachers. Chris Wild gave a well-received plenary talk on teaching inferential reasoning using new dynamic visualizations of conceptualizing sampling variability and he also gave a workshop about teaching statistical inference in schools. Matt Regan and Wayne Stewart also attended. Allan Rossman and Beth Chance (Cal Poly) ran a three-day workshop before the conference to introduce people to their innovative teaching of inference to undergraduate students. See: www.causeweb.org/uscots/

The Sixth International Forum on Statistical Reasoning, Thinking and Literacy.

This Forum was held in Brisbane July 10-16, 2009. The topic under study was the role of context and evidence in informal inferential reasoning. Chris Wild was the plenary speaker. Maxine Pfannkuch and Pip Arnold presented.

Sixth IASE Satellite Conference, South Africa, 14-15 August 2009.

This conference was held before the ISI-57 Conference. The theme of the conference was “Next steps in Statistics Education, with a focus on tertiary statistics teaching.” John Harraway presented an update on the videos developed with the help of the Campbell Fund and now available on the website www.maths.otago.ac.nz/video/statistics. One university in South Africa is about to trial the website. Sharleen Forbes also spoke on the “Creation and evaluation of a workplace based certificate in official statistics for government policy makers”.

ISI-57 (now to be known as World Statistics Congresses) and IASE associated activities

This was held in South Africa, August 2009. Sharleen Forbes gave a presentation on NZ CensusAtSchool as a classroom resource for statistics teachers. The ISLP activities, competition finals and presentations were a highlight of ISI-57 and a major achievement for Juana Sanchez and her helpers. The list of international winners and phase 2 winners of the International Statistical Literacy Competition may be found on the ISLP website: http://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/~iase/islp/

The Eighth International Conference on Teaching Statistics

This will be held in Ljubljana, Slovenia, 11-16 July, 2010. John Harraway (Otago University) is Chair of the International Programme committee and John Shanks is webmaster, so Otago is really running the show. 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. The “invited paper” sessions have now closed but it is still possible to offer a “contributed paper”. For more information see: http://icots8.org/

Local news

CensusAtSchool Project.
This project, sponsored by the Department of Statistics of The University of Auckland, Statistics New Zealand, and the Ministry of Education, was launched on March 3, 2009. The project is directed by Rachel Cunliffe and aims to give 10 to 18 year-old students the experience of participating in a census. Data collection for 2009 is proceeding throughout the year. Pip Arnold is running workshops for teachers on using the CensusAtSchool data throughout New Zealand. The launch of a new sampling analysis tool, designed by Chris Wild and developed with Stephen Cope, is imminent. For a preview visit: http://www.censusatschool.org.nz/dataviewer

NZSA Conference Education Afternoon, Victoria University

On the 3rd September 2009, some teachers from Wellington, Palmerston North, and Christchurch attended a strand of the conference organized by Mike Camden, which focused specifically on statistics education in secondary and primary schools.

Statistics Teachers Day, 24 November 2009, Auckland.

Preparations for this annual day run jointly by the Department of Statistics, The University of Auckland and the Auckland Mathematics Association are well under way. The theme of the day is Building students’ inferential reasoning..

Maxine Pfannkuch

NZSA Education Committee

We’re very pleased that David Vere-Jones has been honoured by NZSA with the Campbell Award. David has taken key actions for statistical education both internationally and within NZ. He was part of the foundation of the International Association for Statistical Education, had a lead role in setting up the ground-breaking Bursaries Maths with Stats course, and has been a member of this committee for much of its history.

Our main focus since the last newsletter has been the Achievement Standards for NCEA. These are being re-created to match the shiny new NZ Curriculum. Example tasks are being written too. We’re lucky that the Ministry-funded writing team and our own committee have an intersection (Pip Arnold & David Phillipps). There are thorny conceptual and textual issues, like how you briefly define what variables are sensible in a scatterplot and regression situation.

We’ve been concerned also about the national standards for numeracy and literacy (primary years). We’ve responded to the initial draft, recommending a strengthening of the statistics in line with what the Curriculum already says.

The NZ Association of Maths Teachers has its 11th biennial conference, ‘Pi in the Sky’, in Palmerston North, around the end of September. The NZSA sponsored speaker is Cliff Konold (Uni of Massachusetts and an author of The TinkerPlots software: it is well worth a google). Several committee members will be there running workshops.

Thanks to the VUW organisers of our recent conference (John Haywood and team) for including a statistics education afternoon of workshops and presentations. Some 25 teachers from the region participated.

Education Committee members who gave presentations at the conference, from left to right: Mike Camden, Maxine Pfannkuch, Tim Burgess, Anne Lawrence, Alasdair Noble

John Harraway’s second set of statistical projects with videos and datasets is now available:
www.maths.otago.ac.nz/video/statistics. This too is worth a good look.