We’ve been meeting monthly this year, and have had attendance from Aucklanders Murray Black (AUT) and Maxine Pfannkuch (University of Auckland).

The curriculum review for school maths is proceeding well. It is likely that the new curriculum will acknowledge the value of statistical thinking as the partner of the deterministic part of mathematical thinking that has dominated in school maths for so long. If this curriculum shift is to translate into new skills for students, then NZ’s teachers will need support from NZ’s practitioners, in the form of datasets, concepts and other resources. It requires a paradigm shift from all of us. You could register in the discussion process:
http://www.tki.org.nz/r/nzcurriculum/cp_online_e.php; and make sure that statistics has a voice. You’ll find the current draft of the one-page ‘essence statement for mathematics and statistics’ in there.

There’s a world-wide ocean of fresh research on the learning of statistics. The Ministry of Education took up our request that this ocean should be searched for findings relevant to NZ’s new curriculum. This has been done, and the results are available for the mathematics curriculum group when it meets in early September. The results will inform the writers of the new curriculum next year. Two members were involved in the final stages of the report and aimed to put the committee’s views.

NCEA Level 2 ran for the first time last year, and is now open for comment. There are two statistical standards (on sampling and probability). They can be found on http://www.nzqa.govt.nz/. We’ve commented on the wording of the sampling one. NCEA Level 3 runs for the first time this year. ‘Statistics and Modelling’ (replacing ‘Maths with Stats’) contains five standards (of its seven) in statistics and probability. It will be open for comment next year, and we have already suggested to the Ministry what our comments will be.

In NCEA Level 3, teachers are dealing this year with the new topic of investigations that involve pairs of measurement variables. The committee has finished an assessment task on this, and has made it available to teachers via http://www.nzamt.org.nz/. We hope we satisfied both the requirements of the standard and the realities of doing a statistical investigation. That wasn’t easy.

The NZSA conference contained a set of three talks that dealt with the above issues. They can be downloaded from the top of this page.

Correspondence on these issues will be added above.
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