ICOTS-7, Working Cooperatively in Statistics Education, Salvador (Bahia), Brazil, July 2-7, 2006.

The International Association for Statistical Education (IASE) and the International Statistical Institute (ISI) are organizing the Seventh International Conference on Teaching Statistics (ICOTS-7) which will be hosted by the Brazilian Statistical Association (ABE) in Salvador (Bahia), Brazil, July 2-7, 2006. Most of the 54 Invited Paper Sessions (arranged into 9 different Topics) are complete. In addition 4 Special Interest Group Meetings (3 of them in both Portuguese and Spanish) have been arranged for those interested in discussing a particular theme.

Call for contributed papers and posters: Contributed papers and posters dealing with any aspect of statistics education are welcome. Contributed papers will be arranged in a variety of sessions, taking into account the proposals received. An optional refereeing process will be arranged for those wishing their papers to be refereed. Those interested in submitting a contributed paper should contact either Joachim Engel (Engel_Joachim@ph-ludwigsburg.de) or Alan McLean (alan.mclean @buseco.monash.edu.au) before September 1, 2005. Those interested in submitting a poster should contact Celi Lopes (celilopes@uol.com.br) before February 1, 2006. Detailed guidelines for authors, deadlines and other information are available at the ICOTS web site at http://www.maths.otago.ac.nz/ icots7. More information can be obtained from Carmen Batanero (batanero@ugr.es).

IASE Satellite to ISI-55, 4-5 April 2005, Sydney.

The theme is Statistics Education and the Communication of Statistics. Many New Zealanders are participating in this conference. At the ISI conference Chris Wild will step down as president of IASE and become the past-president of IASE. Chris has done a magnificent job as president and has really put New Zealand on the map with the establishment of the IASE website on the Auckland Statistics Department homepage.

The IASE has a website at http://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/~iase/. It has a publications page from which over 500 papers from IASE publications and proceedings can be located and downloaded. There is information about IASE forthcoming activities and links to conference websites. The new Statistics Education Research Journal can also be accessed from this website. The November 2004 publication was a special issue focused on Research on Reasoning about Variation and Variability.

In 2004 IASE had a Roundtable conference on curricular development in statistics education in Lund, Sweden. The papers from this conference will soon be available on the IASE website. IASE also organized a topic session on research and development in the teaching and learning of probability and statistics at the 10th International Congress on Mathematical Education in Copenhagen. These ICME-10 papers are available on the IASE website.

In July 2004, a book entitled “The challenge of developing statistical literacy, reasoning and thinking”, edited by Dani Ben-Zvi and Joan Garfield, was published by Kluwer. This book presents and synthesizes cutting edge research on different aspects of statistical reasoning and applies this research to teaching at all levels. See also this JSE link.

Maxine Pfannkuch