International News

USCOTS 2011, 19-21 May, North Carolina.

The fourth biennial conference US conference on Teaching Statistics, hosted by the Consortium for the Advancement of Undergraduate Statistics Education (CAUSE) was held on 19-21 May 2011. Wayne Stewart (Auckland University) was a plenary speaker. See: www.causeweb.org/uscots/.

International Statistical Literacy Poster Competition 2010-2011.

New Zealand schools have been invited to participate in this competition, which is sponsored locally by the NZSA, Waikato University and Auckland University.  The best posters will be submitted to the international competition, the winners of which will be announced at the ISI-2011 meeting. Sashi Sharma (Waikato University) is the organizer. For more information see the ISLP Website [or the NZSA website].

The 7th International Research Forum on Statistical Reasoning, Thinking, and Literacy (SRTL-7), Utrecht University, Texel Island, The Netherlands, 17-23 July, 2011.

Researchers in statistics education from eight countries around the world have been invited to share their work, discuss important issues, and initiate collaborative projects. The theme of the Forum is on New approaches to developing reasoning about samples and sampling in informal statistical inference. See: http://srtl.info.

IASE Satellite Conference to ISI Conference, Dublin, 18-19 August, 2011.

Continuing the successful tradition of IASE satellite conferences immediately before the biennial World Statistics Congress of the International Statistical Institute, the International Association for Statistical Education will hold its 7th IASE Satellite Conference in Dublin, Ireland. The theme of the conference is “Statistics Education and Outreach”. Submission of abstracts has closed. Registration is open until the end of July. See: http://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/~iase.

Volcanic Delta 2011. The 8th Southern Hemisphere Conference on the Teaching and Learning of Undergraduate Mathematics and Statistics, Rotorua, New Zealand, 27 Nov–2 Dec, 2011.

The statistics keynote speaker for this conference is Assoc. Prof. Jennifer Brown, University of Canterbury. Important submission dates are: 30 May for refereed papers, 21 August for communications papers and 31 August for oral presentation abstracts. For more information see: www.delta2011.co.nz.

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 launching the 2011 school census (Rachel Cunliffe) on 2 May 2011. The project is directed by Chris Wild and aims to give 10 to 18 year-old students the experience of participating in a census. New features are Facebook and Twitter to get up to date information and resources such as "7 Billion: Are you typical? – National Geographic Magazine." See: www.censusatschool.org.nz.

Statistics Teachers Day, 2 December 2010, Auckland.

This annual day is run jointly by the Department of Statistics, The University of Auckland and the Auckland Mathematics Association for teachers under the direction of Ross Parsonage. The theme for the day was: NCEA 2011 – Hitting the ground running. Interest from teachers was so high that registrations had to be limited to 200. Resources and some presentations from this day are available at: www.censusatschool.org.nz under new curriculum, then informal inference. A new free software package iNZight, created by Chris Wild and Dineika Chandra, was introduced with resounding success to teachers. The menu-driven software is built on R and allows a drag-and-drop analysis of data. More information on this development and how to access it will be in the next newsletter.

Maxine Pfannkuch
National Correspondent for IASE

NZSA Education Committee

The last six months have been dynamic in various ways, as you’ll see below. Our main local interests continue to be the new NCEA standards and free interactive software for schools. Our December meeting was the biggest yet, with 19 people in five locations.

The new NCEA achievement standards in Mathematics and Statistics.

The country’s achievement standards in the learning area that was renamed Mathematics and Statistics are being rewritten, so that assessment does promote the new focus of the Curriculum (2007). This year, the new Level 1 standards are in use. Level 2 comes in next year. For Level 3, we put several meetings worth of work into getting the concepts right. The last of these meetings was on 21 Feb, and on the next day the earthquake intervened in our activities. We’re concerned about what skills we really want to assess. There’s a great opportunity to shift this skill set further towards thinking about what the data is saying and how useful the tools are, and away from the skills of persuading reluctant software to produce results. For Level 3, the updated draft should appear in August.

There are several people who are very active in statistical education in Christchurch. We’d like to wish them all sympathy for the disruption to their lives and work.

This site lets people access standards and assessment exemplars:
http://www.tki.org.nz/e/community/ncea/mathematics.php.

Members of the committee continue to comment on associated curriculum work, such as the key ideas underpinning each strand and level of the statistics curriculum. A recent paper was about how the probability concepts link together, from the first year at school to the last. For this and many other papers that background the curriculum, see http://www.nzmaths.co.nz/key-mathematical-ideas?parent_node.

Statistical software for schools

John Harraway reports on progress for GenStat for Teaching and Learning (GLT Schools):

A growing number of schools are discovering GTL Schools. A successful Saturday workshop was held for the Auckland Mathematics Teachers Association in mid March. The session was presented by Freya Broughton-Ansin who is teaching on the North Shore this year having completed her honours degree in Statistics at Otago in 2009 followed by a year at the College of Education in Dunedin in 2010. Freya helped develop the GenStat lessons to match the videos on the University of Otago Dept of Mathematics and Statistics website. Freya is being approached to present another workshop to the Auckland Mathematics Teachers Association and to present the workshop in Whangarei. Reports indicate that GTL Schools is being used in place of Excel in some schools and also being used by Year 13 biology teachers to help with project work.

Dinieka Chandra, who is part of the authoring team for iNZight, reports from Auckland: iNZight was a hit at the 2 Dec Teachers’ day. I nearly laughed when I heard several oohs and ahhs when Ross Parsonage was doing the demonstration. Teachers were running to the lab to make sure they got seats at the workshop session. They liked how easy it was even with the many features. Overall, they totally enjoyed playing with it and the response was very positive!

World Statistics Day

20/10/2010 was World Statistics Day. The "informal inference" paper by Maxine Pfannkuch, Matt Regan, Nick Horton and Chris Wild was the "read paper" at the Royal Statistical Society in London on the day. It was well received.

Left to right: Chris Triggs, Nick Horton, Maxine Pfannkuch, Matt Regan, and Chris Wild at the Royal Statistical Society meeting.

Statistics in the Media books win inaugural educational publishing awards

Copyright Licensing Limited and Publishers Association of NZ have set up some inaugural educational publishing awards, with categories for primary, secondary, and higher education. The two recent Statistics in the Media books won the primary award. They were developed by Learning Media, with input from some members of the committee. The committee congratulates the authors, Lisa Darragh and Jasmine Hardy, and Learning Media.

Roger Littlejohn

As NZSA president, webmaster and executive member, Roger was always strongly supportive of statistical education, and very understanding of this committee’s activities. We are very sorry that we are now without him.

Mike Camden

ISPL Poster Competition

A grant of $500, from the NZSA Campbell Fund, was made towards the national prizes for the International Statistical Literacy Project (ISLP) International Poster Competition. The mission of this ISI organisation is to support, create and participate in statistical literacy activities and promotion around the world. The aim of the poster competition is to promote statistics learning and education at school level.

Congratulations to Asha, Swashna and Sasha (Mission Heights Junior College), and Megan, Jack and Mitchell (Cashmere Primary School), for coming first equal in the National section for the International Statistical Literacy Project (ISLP) International Poster Competition.

Webmaster Update:
Congratulations to Megan, Jack and Mitchell of Cashmere Primary School (Christchurch) for their recent success in the international competition. Their poster, "Can you predict the weather at midday by looking out your window in the morning?", won third prize in the intermediate section. For more information visit the New News page.