Congratulations to John Harraway on his election as President of the International Association of Statistical Education (IASE)!

International News

IASE Roundtable 2012.

The International Association for Statistical Education (IASE) is organizing the 2012 Roundtable Conference on Technology in Statistics Education: Virtualities and Realities, which will be held July 2-6, 2012 in Cebu City, Philippines. See: http://icots.net/roundtable/.

ICME-12, July 8-15 2012, Seoul, Korea.

The 12th International Congress on Mathematical Education has two topic study groups organised by IASE, one on the Teaching and Learning of Statistics (TSG 12) and the other on probability (TSG 13). Deadline for paper proposals was 30th November 2011. For more information see: http://www.icme12.org/.

International Statistical Literacy Project Awards.

Poster Competition 2010-2011.

New Zealand schools were invited to participate in this competition, which was sponsored locally by the NZSA, Waikato University and Auckland University. Sashi Sharma (Waikato University) was the organizer. In the international competition New Zealand attained 3rd prize in the younger age division (age 12-15). The poster was: “Can you predict the weather at midday by looking out your window in the morning?” from Cashmere Primary School, Christchurch by students Megan Snell, Jack Boyd and Mitchell Sammut.
See:www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/~iase/islp/competition-second.
[or visit Newsletter 73: New News page. Webmaster]

Best Cooperative Project Award in Statistical Literacy 2011.

New Zealand was a joint winner: Statistics New Zealand and NAOS (the Network of Academics in Official Statistics) for their project, “A post-graduate program in official statistics” (participants: Alan Lee, Andrew Sporle, Sharleen Forbes, Richard Arnold, John Harraway, Jenny Brown, Natalie Jackson).
See: www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/~iase/islp/bestproject.
[or read the 'Feature' report in this Edition. Webmaster]

Inaugural Journal of Statistics Education Best Paper Award.

This award was given by the American Statistical Association to Maxine Pfannkuch, Matt Regan, Chris Wild (Auckland University) and Nick Horton (Smith College, USA) for their 2010 paper Telling Data Stories: Essential Dialogues for Comparative Reasoning. Available at:
www.amstat.org/publications/jse/v18n1/pfannkuch.pdf.

Local News

Stats Chat Blog www.statschat.org.nz

This blog, the brainchild of Rachel Cunliffe and Julie Middleton, was launched this year by the Department of Statistics, Auckland University. Primary contributors to date are: Thomas Lumley, Rachel Cunliffe, Julie Middleton, Stephen Cope, David Scott, Andrew Balemi, and James Curran. The aim of the blog is to increase the statistical literacy of journalists and the general public. The blog will also be a very useful resource for teachers for delivering the statistical literacy strand of the curriculum. The latest blogs are about the election, the Rugby World Cup predictions, and Bayes’ Theorem in relation to court evidence. If you would like to become a regular contributor please contact Rachel Cunliffe, the coordinator of the blog at: statschat@gmail.com.

CensusAtSchool Project.

This project, sponsored by the Department of Statistics of The University of Auckland, Statistics New Zealand, and the Ministry of Education, launched the 2011 school census (Rachel Cunliffe) on 2 May 2011. To date over 27,700 students have participated. 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.

New SURF released.

Statistics NZ has released a set of datasets based on the NZ Income Survey. Each dataset contains about 11,000 records for six variables. Students can explore the features of the distributions and relationships. These are close to the features in the original real dataset. This product should help meet the needs of teachers and students, as they work on the Mathematics and Statistics area of the NZ Curriculum. Available at:
www.stats.govt.nz/tools_and_services/services/schools_corner.aspx.

Statistics Education Research Project.

A collaborative two-year Year 13 and Stage One research project across Auckland University (Maxine Pfannkuch), Victoria University (Sharleen Forbes) and Otago University (John Harraway), involving a team of 33 people from around New Zealand, is now underway. The research is focused on developing inferential concepts via bootstrapping and randomization methods. The project is funded in part by the Teaching and Learning Research Initiative (www.tlri.org.nz).

NZSA Conference, Auckland, 2011.

The conference this year had a statistics education strand with a plenary talk by Wayne Stewart, Auckland University. Wayne demonstrated his innovative teaching approaches using puppets, songs and audience participation, which captivate and engage his students when learning Bayesian inference.

Maxine Pfannkuch
National Correspondent for IASE

NZSA Education Committee

Since the last newsletter, we have met four times: in May, June, September and November.

The new NCEA achievement standards for the curriculum’s Mathematics and Statistics area

Students at NCEA Level 1 (approximately Year 11) have sat the first exam that uses the new standards. Level 2 follows next year, with steps into experimental design. Level 3 follows in 2013, with further steps into experimental design, and the very refreshing steps into resampling methods for inference.

One of our aims is to maintain or build links with the people in the Ministry of Education and the NZ Qualifications Authority who work on Mathematics and Statistics issues. In November, four of us (Chris Wild, Maxine Pfannkuch, Emma Mawby, and Mike Camden) visited NZQA, and discussed how we could best provide supportive feedback on the external assessments and exemplars of student work that they produce. We agreed on the importance to NZ of getting these assessments right, and that we would provide feedback.

We will be communicating our views on the recent first exam; which is at http://www.nzqa.govt.nz/nqfdocs/ncea-resource/exams/2011/91037-exm-2011.pdf, and on how the Scholarship qualification in statistics can be structured to function along with the incoming Level 3 standards.

Freely available statistical software for schools.

Use of GenStat for Teaching and Learning (GTL) is progressing. By the end of August 2011, 11 schools in the South Island were using GTL, also the Christchurch Polytechnic Institute of Technology and the University of Otago. Trial requests have been received from 57 other New Zealand high schools as well as Auckland, Massey and Lincoln Universities.

The R-based system from University of Auckland staff, iNZight, is progressing. It has an improved and simplified installation system. It includes features that help students to visualise inferential concepts, and to carry out resampling methods. These features relate to the collaborative statistics education research project described by Maxine above. The authors report: ‘Use of the iNZight program for analysing statistical data has just been made a whole lot easier. The software is now packaged in a form where it can be downloaded (or copied) and then used on Windows machines without the user needing to have administrative privileges, because it now needs no formal installation’. See the downloads page at
http://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/~wild/iNZight/.

NZ Association of Maths Teachers conference: Dunedin: July 2011.

NZAMT’s 12th biennial conference included two statistical plenaries, from Helen MacGillivray (Queensland University of Technology, and then President of IASE), and the committee’s Pip Arnold. Among other things, Helen was keen for probability to be liberated from the trap of being used as an exercise in algebra and arithmetic. Her plenary was titled “Realisation of the learning riches in statistics”.NZSA provided financial support for her visit. Pip’s was on “What is the story? Being a data detective”.

We noted that, more than ever, teachers are keen to have good sources of realistic data for their students to analyse.

NZAMT 13 will be in Wellington in October 2013, and is named “Absolutely Positively Mathematics and Statistics”. It will be the first NZAMT conference with ‘statistics’ in its title.

Statistics in the primary sector.

The MoE have commissioned a “consistency framework” to assist teachers in making overall teacher judgements (OTJs) for National Standards. This requires defining a number of “aspects” of maths and statistics. An “aspect” is a distinct area of mathematical thinking e.g. “Measurement” or “Multiplicative thinking”. It also requires defining the progressions or key junctures in students’ learning within the “aspects”. We would like this to follow the key ideas that are in here: http://www.nzmaths.co.nz/key-mathematical-ideas/.

Congratulations!

John Harraway is now the President of the International Association for Statistical Education. We are honoured to have him on our committee.

The organisers of the 2011 NZSA conference gave statistical education a strong role. We thank them for this.

Staff from several universities and Statistics NZ have worked together to design the course: Special Topic – Official Statistics. It ran successfully in the last semester. We congratulate Sharleen and her team on this innovation, and on co-winning the ISI International Statistical Literacy Project’s Best Cooperative Project in Statistical Literacy award. Details of the course are here: http://msor.victoria.ac.nz/Courses/ORST482_2011T2/CourseOutline.

Also, we’d like to congratulate our colleagues on receiving the first of the new Best Paper Awards for Journal of Statistical Education papers:
Telling Data Stories: Essential Dialogues for Comparative Reasoning; by Maxine Pfannkuch, Matt Regan, Chris Wild and Nicholas J. Horton, March 2010.
http://www.amstat.org/publications/jse/v18n1/pfannkuch.pdf.

Mike Camden
Education Committee