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 organising 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.

Planning is now well advanced and the ICOTS-7 website at http://www.maths.otago.ac.nz/icots7 is being continuously updated. It contains summaries of Topics and Sessions, abstracts for all the invited papers, contact addresses for invited speakers, session organisers, topic convenors and organising committees and much more about the conference organisation.

The website also has information about the charm of Salvador Bahia and pictures of the guest rooms and conference facilities at the Othon Hotel where the conference is being held. Conference participants are encouraged to stay at the Othon Hotel, and enjoy views like this.

Call for Papers
Statistics educators, statisticians, teachers and educators at large are invited to contribute to the Scientific Programme. Types of contributions include Invited Papers (now mainly complete), Contributed Papers and Posters. Voluntary refereeing procedures will be implemented for ICOTS-7. Details of how to prepare manuscripts, the refereeing process and final submission arrangements are on the website.

Invited Papers
Invited Paper Sessions are organised within 9 different Conference Topics. The list of Session themes, with e-mail contact information for Session Organisers, is available on the ICOTS-7 website under “Scientific Programme”.

Contributed Papers
Contributed Paper sessions will be arranged in a variety of areas. Those interested in submitting a contributed paper should contact either Joachim Engel (Engel_Joachim@ph-ludwigsburg.de) or Alan MacLean (alan.mclean@buseco.monash.edu.au). The deadline for refereed invited and contributed papers is 1 November 2005, for non-refereed papers 1 January 2006.

Posters
Those interested in submitting a poster should contact Celi Lopes (celilopes@uol.com.br) before February 1, 2006.

More information is available from the ICOTS-7 website at http://www.maths.otago.ac.nz/icots7 or from the ICOTS IPC Chair Carmen Batanero (batanero@ugr.es), the Programme Chair Susan Starkings (starkisa@lsbu.ac.uk), and the Scientific Secretary John Harraway (jharraway@maths.otago.ac.nz).

John Harraway

IASE Satellite to ISI-55, 4-5 April 2005, Sydney. The theme was Statistics Education and the Communication of Statistics. Many New Zealanders participated in this conference and the IASE statistics education section at ISI. Some of the participants were: Chris Wild, Rachel Cunliffe, Mike Forster, David Vere-Jones, Sharleen Forbes, Harold Henderson, John Pemberton, Mike Camden, Lesley Hooper, Pauline Stuart, Gareth McGuinness, Bronwyn Weston, Vasha Parag. Publications from both these conferences can be obtained from the website: http://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/~iase.

New Book. In April 2005, a book entitled “Exploring probability in school: Challenges for teaching and learning”, edited by Graham Jones, was published by Kluwer. This book presents extensive research on different aspects of teaching and learning probability at all Year levels.

Local news

The Fourth International Forum on Statistical Reasoning, Thinking and Literacy (SRTL-4). The Forum took place at The University of Auckland in July. This particular gathering of researchers has played an important role in advancing understanding of the richness and depth of reasoning about distribution, a key focus of statistics education.

The forum was sponsored by Key College Publishing (USA), The American Statistical Association (ASA) Section on Statistical Education, the Department of Statistics, The University of Auckland, the Department of Mathematics at the University of Auckland, and the New Zealand Statistical Association (NZSA).

The focus of SRTL-4 on reasoning about distribution emerged from the previous three SRTL conferences. Distribution is a key concept in statistics, and yet statisticians and educators may not be aware of how difficult it is for students to develop a deep understanding of this concept. When students are given tasks involving comparing distributions or making inferences, they often fail to utilize relevant information contained in the underlying distributions. Curricular materials often focus on construction and identification of distributions, but not on what these distributions mean to students and how they interpret them.

Twenty researchers in statistics education from six countries shared their work. New Zealanders involved in SRTL-4 were: Maxine Pfannkuch, Chris Wild, Ross Parsonage, Tim Burgess and Pip Arnold. Sessions were held in an informal style, with a high level of interaction. With emphasis on reasoning about distribution, a wide range of research projects were presented spanning learners of all ages, as well as teachers. These demonstrated an interesting diversity in research methods, theoretical approaches and points of view.

The programme began with an overview talk by Chris Wild entitled: “A statistician’s view on the concept of distribution”. Eight presentations of SRTL-4 were thematically grouped into five clusters. A cluster included one or two ninety-minute research presentations to the entire group, small group discussions, and a whole group reflection on the cluster. All presenters showed a small subset of video segments of their research. The programme ended with three discussants reflecting on reasoning about distribution from research, curriculum, and technology viewpoints.
The research forum proved to be very productive in many ways. Several types of scientific publications will be produced including a CD-ROM of the proceedings, and a special issue of Statistics Education Research Journal (SERJ) on reasoning about distribution. SRTL will set up its website at the Department of Statistics, University of Auckland at http://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/

For further information on SRTL please contact the Co-chairs Joan Garfield (jbg@umn.edu) and Dani Ben-Zvi
(dbenzvi@univ.haifa.ac.il).

The CensusAtSchool Project. This project, sponsored by the Department of Statistics, The University of Auckland, Statistics New Zealand, and The Ministry of Education, was launched on 15 August 2005. The project is co-directed by Chris Wild and Rachel Cunliffe and aims not only to give students the experience of participating in a census but also to provide rich classroom resources for Years 5 to 10 students using the CensusAtSchool data. For more information, photos, press releases, newsclips, exciting new classroom resources see:
http://www.censusatschool.org.nz/

Maxine Pfannkuch