International News

The Eighth International Conference on Teaching Statistics, 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. Many New Zealanders are attending and presenting at this conference. For more information see: http://icots8.org/.

Consortium for the Advancement of Undergraduate Statistics Education Webinars.

CAUSE webinars: http://www.causeweb.org/webinar/. To listen to some really interesting statistics education talks or learn about teaching activities go to the CAUSE (Consortium for the Advancement of Undergraduate Statistics Education) website.

The Seventh International Research Forum on Statistical Reasoning, Thinking and Literacy, The Freudenthal Institute, Utrecht, The Netherlands.
17-23 July 2011.

The theme of the forum is: New approaches to developing reasoning about samples and sampling in the context of informal statistical inference. Conference attendance is by invitation. Inquiries may be addressed to: Arthur Bakker, Freudenthal Institute. Email: a.bakker@fi.uu.nl/.

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, is focusing on preparing the 2010 census (Rachel Cunliffe) in conjunction with the NZ census (Lesley Hooper). The project is directed by Chris Wild and aims to give 10 to 18 year-old students the experience of participating in a census. See: //www.censusatschool.org.nz/.

National Numeracy Conference, 16-19 February 2010, Auckland.

At the annual numeracy conference Chris Wild and Maxine Pfannkuch gave a joint keynote address on “Building Students’ Inferential Reasoning” which is now on the CensusAtSchool website at: http://censusatschool.org.nz/2009/informal-inference.

Statistics Teachers Day, 24 November 2009, Auckland.

This annual day run jointly by the Department of Statistics, The University of Auckland and the Auckland Mathematics Association focused on building students’ inferential reasoning at the Year 10 level in preparation for the introduction of the new statistics curriculum this year. For videos of talks and resource materials see:
http://censusatschool.org.nz/2009/informal-inference.

The Teaching and Learning Research Initiative.

The Teaching and Learning Research Initiative (website: http://www.tlri.org.nz/) under the auspices of the New Zealand Council for Educational Research is currently funding two projects in statistics education: “Building students’ inferential reasoning: Statistics curriculum levels 5 and 6” led by Maxine Pfannkuch; and “Developing secondary school students’ understanding of statistical literacy in a data-analysis environment” led by Sashi Sharma.

Masters Theses in Statistics Education.

Jason Florence, The University of Auckland, has recently completed his thesis entitled “Year 10 students’ thinking and reasoning about probability”.

Maxine Pfannkuch
National Correspondent for IASE

NZSA Education Committee

The committee wrapped up 2009 by meeting with the Ministry of Education’s specialists in ‘mathematics and statistics’: Ian Stevens and Angela Jones. They are on the same wavelength as ourselves, in seeing that the needs of teachers and learners in statistics are very different from the needs for the rest of mathematics. We are all very aware that suitable software is essential for 21st century learning of statistics.

In February a small group of us, including both John Harraway and David Baird, met the Ministry team again, this time to demonstrate a version of GenStat that may be made available free to NZ schools.

Our first committee meeting of 2010, in March, was a large one, with about a dozen of us connected by video (courtesy of Statistics NZ) and phone. The main topic again was software. The word ‘free’ seems to engage the interest of people in the school education sector very well. Besides GenStat, there are possibilities for R, and R-Commander or other interactive packages. There’s also the other home-grown product CAST, which would serve a different function.

Free interactive graphical software could support two other innovations: resampling methods for inference (which is in the new curriculum), and informal inference. NZ could lead the world in both these developments. They both involve plenty of learning for all: ourselves, teachers, and students. We plan to draft a policy statement for NZSA, about software for schools. This is likely to say that software is essential, from an early age, for concept development and for data exploration. We would support any software that meets the learning needs as stated in the curriculum. This software would need to be interactive and visual, with quality graphics. Please see the separate entry for more about the GenStat opportunity.

Chris Wild and Dineika Chandrananda at the University of Auckland are investigating the possibilities for an R package that will meet the needs of NZ school students. It would be menu-driven, very graphical, and as interactive as possible.

Doug Stirling is investigating development of a set of CAST resources to support teachers and learners of statistics for the new curriculum, and the forthcoming new NCEA standards that will derive from it.

The contents of the new curriculum in ‘mathematics and statistics’ are due to be assessed at NCEA levels 1, 2 and 3 in 2011, 2012, and 2013. We have had some input into the ongoing process of writing the achievement standards and unit standards, and the support materials for them.

Doug has just released a new CAST e-book about experimental design for agriculture and biology. As with previous CAST e-books, it makes extensive use of dynamic diagrams (applets) to help teach concepts - it has 189 pages and 168 applets. Other recent improvements are an e-book of interactive exercises and removal of the requirement to register before using CAST. The latest release can be accessed at
        http://cast.massey.ac.nz/collection_public.html
and can be either used directly from there or downloaded and run locally.