New Zealand Statistical Association Newsletter 65
March 2007
School Statistics Curriculum
Education News
Stats Education DVD
School Statistics Curriculum
Our Association has been very active in responding to the new draft curriculum for primary and secondary schools that was released last year. Members of our Education Committee and many others have been meeting regularly, and have finalised a number of responses to the draft. You can view these on our website which is located at http://nzsa.rsnz.org/index.shtml. The following are some of the submissions relating to the Statistics component of the Curriculum that are on the website.
New Zealand Statistical Association (general comments)
Statistics New Zealand (general comments)
Video Conference Group (cover note)
Video Conference Group (comments by curriculum category)
NZSA Education Committee (online feedback form)
The first three of these are letters written to support the NZSA response to the draft, and are by our President, by the Government Statistician (Brian Pink), and by Chris Wild who was on the video conference group, led by Maxine Pfannkuch, that prepared the NZSA submission. The fourth is our detailed submission on the statistics strand of the draft curriculum prepared by the video group. Finally there are some short comments on the overall draft curriculum document prepared by the Education Committee.
We have given permission to the Ministry of Education to publish our submission in its entirety on their online learning centre to enable others to “access, analyse and learn from our feedback” (their words, not ours!).
Several members of the Education Committee attended and presented at the National Numeracy Conference 2007 (colloquially referred to as the Numeracy Hui). This was the swan song for Pauline Stuart, who is off to Qatar for eighteen months. The Hui predominantly focused on numerical and increasingly on algebraic thinking, but we continue to press for statistical thinking to also become a more integral part of the Numeracy Projects.
Alex Neill
Convenor
NZSA Education Committee
alex.neill@nzcer.org.nz
Statistics Education News
International News
IASE Satellite Conference Assessing Student Learning in Statistics will be held just before the 56th ISI Biennial Session at Guimaraes, Portugal. These IASE Satellites are attracting increasing numbers of statistics educators. Papers are currently being refereed. For more information see: http://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/~iase/conferences.php?show=iasesat07.
International Statistical Literacy Project (ISLP). This project, chaired by Juana Sanchez, UCLA (USA), involves an international collaboration among statistics educators to communicate information to people interested and involved in Statistical Literacy or who want to teach it. The ISLP website is rich in resources with web pages on general resources and definitions, assessment, reports useful for teaching statistics, learning materials from national and international statistical offices, listings of statistical literacy projects around the world, and children’s censuses.
New Books. Two statistics education books were published
in 2006. Both these books give a good overview of recent statistics education
research at the primary and secondary school levels and are good resources
for teachers of statistics.
Watson, J. M. (2006). Statistical literacy at school: growth and goals.
Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Burrill, G., & Elliott, P. (Eds.) (2006). Thinking and reasoning
with data and chance; Sixty-eighth Yearbook. Reston, VA: National
Council of Teachers of Mathematics.
A good website for keeping up to date with new resources is: http://www.augsburg.edu/statlit/.
Joint ICMI/IASE Study, Statistics Education in School Mathematics: Challenges for Teaching and Teacher Education. The International Commission on Mathematics Instruction (ICMI) Executive committee invited IASE to cooperate in a joint study focused on statistics. The invitation was accepted by IASE, which proposed to merge the Study Conference with IASE’s next Roundtable Conference to be held in 2008 in Monterey, Mexico. Carmen Batenero is chair of the International Programme Committee (IPC) of the joint study. Planning is underway for this study, which will result in a book being published in 2010. Meetings of the IPC were held at ICOTS-7 and further meetings are planned for ISI-56. For more information see: http://www.ugr.es/~icmi/iase_study/.
SRTL-5 Forum. The 5th International Forum on Statistical Reasoning, Thinking and Literacy will be held in England at the University of Warwick, 11-17 August 2007. The focus of the Forum will be on Reasoning about Statistical Inference. For more information see: http://srtl.stat.auckland.ac.nz/.
Local News
School curriculum. The feedback process for the draft of the National Curriculum has finished and the feedback is being analysed. Several summary reports have been developed on the curriculum in general and some detailed feedback has been received, particularly from secondary teachers, from nzmaths and meetings of lead teachers (HOD’s) in Auckland. Many of the issues are to do with detail of the achievement objectives, professional development and the connection of the curriculum to NCEA. Vince Wright, project director for the mathematics and statistics curriculum, is charged with finalizing the curriculum by mid-May. Also, during 2007, he is bringing groups of people together to write some exemplars of activities students should be able to achieve at each level. Please contact me (m.pfannkuch@auckland.ac.nz) if you think you could make some contribution to the writing or monitoring (i.e. checking the correctness of the ideas and language) of the statistics and probability exemplars.
Masters Theses in Statistics Education. Three students
at The University of Auckland have recently completed their masters theses
in statistics education.
Lynda Merriman: Using media reports to develop statistical literacy in
Year 10 students.
Megan Jowsey: Statistical investigations across the curriculum –
Year 13 Biology.
Joanne Woodward: Statistical thinking as modelled by two Year 10 teachers
when teaching informal inference using box plots.
Maxine Pfannkuch
Statistics Education DVD
A special session on statistics education was organised at the Dunedin NZSA Conference in 2005. Seven researchers at the University of Otago spoke about their research and illustrated the statistical procedures used in their work. This was filmed during the conference with the aim of making a DVD, and subsequently re-recorded in a studio environment. Since then Statistics New Zealand has also recorded two clips, which means nine case studies in the final DVD.
The DVD of the talks was produced by the Staff in the Higher Education Development Unit at the University of Otago, and is now available through the CASM Unit, University of Otago. For more information and an order form see http://www.maths.otago.ac.nz/downloads/statsinresearch.pdf.
This project was supported by a grant of $750 from the Campbell Fund.
John Harraway