New Zealand Statistical Association Newsletter 59
March 2004
Current Education Issues
Statistics in NZ Schools
The NZ Statistical Association's one-day conference, on Thurs 1 July, at VUW, contained a session on 'Statistics in NZ Schools'. The organisers invited teachers to attend this session, and a good number did so.
The three speakers and their topics (linked to PowerPoint presentations) were:
- Geoff Gibbs (Ministry of Education):
Review of the Mathematics Curriculum in NZ Schools 1.4MB
4/8/2004 - Mike Camden (NZSA Education Committee):
Revitalising the Curriculum for Statistics in NZ Schools 190KB
4/8/2004 - Catherine Marshall (Wellington Mathematics Association):
The Impact of NCEA and Graphics Calculators on the Teaching of Secondary School Statistics 44KB 4/8/2004
Education Committee 2/3/4 - Mike Camden
Australian Statistics
Education System
As usual, there are several opportunities for the statistical community to support the progress of school statistics.
Statistics and modelling in Year 13
With the arrival of NCEA Level 3 this year, the old Year 13 (7
th Form) subject Maths with Stats becomes transformed into a somewhat altered subject. Sometimes the new subject gets called Statistics and Modelling. This name reflects the shift in content. The new subject has some more stats (relationships between numerical variables), the same probability, and less maths (the part that remains is the "modelling"). The new content poses a challenge for teachers, who need to work out how to teach and assess it (and they’ll need suitable datasets). At the same time it brings a great opportunity for students to take a highly visual and interactive approach to real data.Our job is to spend a Saturday in March constructing some assessment tasks for this. Your job is to send us some fascinating NZ-based datasets!
Scholarship in Statistics and Modelling
As the Bursary exams disappear, so do the old Year 13 Scholarship systems. There’s a new award, with the same content as NCEA Level 3, but a new slant. Thanks to input from NZSA’s Education Committee, this slant includes "statistical thinking". We hope that the defining document for this award will lead the whole school system into a very thoughtful, practical and satisfying vision of statistics.
The NZ Curriculum Review
The Ministry of Education has set up several teams that are reviewing the entire NZ school curriculum. There is a wonderful (and urgent) opportunity for the statistical community to make sure that stats in the NZ Curriculum
• has a sound progressive structure itself,
• has a healthy relationship with the maths,
• has strong links with sciences, social sciences, communications subjects, etc. The stats needs to be there when the other subjects need it.
The Education Committee has met with some of the Ministry’s managers of the Review. Maxine Pfannkuch represents us on the Maths Group. Late last year Mike Camden put our views to the Maths, Social Sciences and the Umbrella groups.
Maxine reports from the Maths Group that Statistics is currently being viewed as a discipline in its own right with strong links to mathematics. Hence the curriculum subject "mathematics" is becoming "mathematics and statistics".
This project runs till 2006, and there will be opportunities for NZSA members to contribute. If you’d like to be involved, please let us know.
NZAMT Conferences
The recent NZ Association of Maths Teachers’ Conference was in July last year, in Hamilton. Jeff Witmer (our third NZSA overseas invited speaker for these events) and Harold Henderson both gave plenary sessions and workshops. They both demonstrated to the 400 or so teachers present that stats can be graphic, relevant and surprising.
The next NZAMT conference is in Christchurch, September 2005.
The Committee
The committee continues to meet in Wellington, with some attendees from Palmerston North, and some e-mail contacts. If you want to work with us, please let us know!
Datasets
Members of NZSA could make a very practical contribution to school Statistics by sending in some datasets (to Lesley, who is the Education Committee secretary Lesley.Hooper@stats.govt.nz). They will be most useful for the immediate NCEA situation if they are
• in some spreadsheet software format,
• contain two or more numerical variables and some categorical variables,
• are cleaned (at least of the errors that an outside user could not fix),
• are well documented, with variable definitions and a ‘story’ about the origin,
• have a nice fresh local NZ context.
Mike Camden
ASES
(Australian Statistics Education System) A series of documents have been produced jointly between the
Statistical Society of Australia, the Australian Bureau of Statistics and the
Curriculum Corporation. These are in the public domain at
www.statsoc.org.au.
The objective is an integrated approach to Statistics education in Australia
that is designed both to ensure a supply of statistical professionals for
industry, research and academia, and to help Australian people understand and
respond in better-informed ways to the uncertainties of the world they live in.
Correspondence on these
issues will be added above.
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