New Zealand Statistical Association Newsletter 66
September 2007
NZSA Education Committee
We’re having a quieter year since the last couple of years, since the NZ school curriculum has been put to bed at the printers. It will emerge in its final form in October. We hope that it keeps NZ at the forefront in having well-designed and highly useful statistics in our schools. The next task will be to ensure that teachers are supported with written resources, datasets and other information.
The education sessions at this year’s conference were well attended by a score or more of Canterbury teachers, as well as some of the other conference goers. Congratulations to the organisers, notably Ian Westbrooke and John Harraway, for providing this event that seemed to meet the needs of the audience. Teachers would have gone away with several disks of resources.
The 10th biennial conference of the NZ Association of Maths Teachers, ‘The Power of 10’, is in Auckland in September. NZSA is sponsoring a keynote speaker, Maxine Pfannkuch. We hope that this NZAMT, like the recent ones, helps to liberate energy for the teaching of statistics. The Committee is promoting other statistical workshops.
If you want to have a hand in policy or support for statistical education,
please contact us:
Alex.Neill@nzcer.org.nz,
Mike.Camden@stats.govt.nz.
Mike Camden
Statistics Education News
International News
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 are planned for ISI-56. The deadline for submitting papers is October 1st 2007. For more information see: http://www.ugr.es/~icmi/iase_study/.
International Census in Schools. A workshop in Melbourne in March of participating countries, Australia, Canada, UK, and South Africa, was attended by Chris Wild, Rachel Cunliffe, Sharleen Forbes, Kim Cullen and Ian Stevens. The workshop enabled participating countries to report back on their progress and lessons learned and common international questions were drafted. The workshop formed an international committee (with Sharleen Forbes as New Zealand member) with a view to extending the programme to more countries such as the US, Singapore and France.
Local News
The CensusAtSchool Project. This project, sponsored by the Department of Statistics of The University of Auckland, Statistics New Zealand, and the Ministry of Education, was launched on August 13 2007. The project is directed by Rachel Cunliffe and aims to give 10 to 18 year-old students the experience of participating in a census. CensusAtSchool has previously been run in 2003 and 2005 and this latest snapshot will enable students to compare themselves with data from the last two surveys. Over 1250 teachers registered their classes to take part. Rich classroom resources for students using the CensusAtSchool data are also available on the website. CensusAtSchool is part of an international effort to boost statistical capability among young people, and is also conducted in the UK, Australia, Canada and South Africa. For more information, photos, press releases, newsclips, exciting classroom resources see: http://www.censusatschool.org.nz/.
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