New Zealand Statistical Association Newsletter 67
March 2008
NZSA Education Committee
The NZ Curriculum
emerged in November 2007, with, as you might expect, a learning area newly
labelled Mathematics and Statistics. The job for NZSA now is to help ensure
that teachers have whatever support they want for delivering it. One part
of that support will be the glossary. This will be accessible by internet,
and needs to give a school-friendly lead into about 50 statistical terms.
Mike was in the UK in December, and spoke with an RSS-organised group
about the curriculum.
They were impressed - not by him, but by the content and design of the
curriculum. He may have made it sound a lot more perfect than it is!
There will be another downstream task, later, of ensuring that the NCEA
Standards are revised to be in keeping with the spirit and content of
the new curriculum.
Back in September, the NZ Association of Maths Teachers held its 10th
biennial conference, in Auckland. NZSA was very ably represented by our
invited speaker, Maxine, in an address titled Statistics teaching
at the beginning of the 21st century. We were also ably represented
in several workshops, including one by Alex Neill and Deborah Brunning
of this committee, titled Statistical shifts and the curriculum.
The next NZAMT is in Palmerston North, in 2009 (p
in the Sky).
Dates of EdComm meetings this year are:
Tue 26 Feb
Tue 15 Apr
Thur 5 Jun
Tue 12 Aug
Thur 9 Oct
Thur 4 Dec
Meetings are 4-6pm (-ish). We have booked rooms in both Wellington and
Auckland, and car parks 6 and 7 in Wellington.
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) and IASE are running a joint study focused
on statistics in June 2008 in Monterrey, Mexico. Carmen Batenero is chair
of the International Programme Committee of the joint study. Papers have
been submitted. For more information see: http://www.ugr.es/~icmi/iase_study/.
ICME (International Congress on Mathematical Education).
At this conference in Monterrey, Mexico, 6-13 July 2008, there will be
two topic studies groups on the research and development in the teaching
and learning of statistics and probability. See: http://icme11.org.
International Statistical Review Special Issue on Statistics Education.
Chris Wild was the guest editor for the December issue of International
Statistical Review (Volume
75 Issue 3 Themed Papers on Statistical Education). It contains a
suite of educationally focused papers which should be of interest to practitioners
and technology buffs as well as academics and other educators. A basic
theme of the papers is how to give students experiences much closer to
the practice of professional statisticians than has been possible in the
past. This is done by using technology to collapse the time scale needed
for instruction. The main areas used as illustrations are the design of
experiments and multivariate analysis. Although these are relatively advanced
topics, many of the ideas discussed can be applied at any level of statistical
education.
Local News
Mathematics and Statistics School Curriculum. The new
2008 school curriculum was launched at the end of last year. Mike Camden
gave a presentation to a Royal Statistical Society group in the UK on
the changes that had been made to the statistics curriculum and how the
NZSA had been involved in the process.
The CensusAtSchool Project. This project, sponsored by
the Department of Statistics of The University of Auckland, Statistics
New Zealand, and the Ministry of Education will continue to run this year
under the directorship of Rachel Cunliffe and Chris Wild. The main emphasis
in 2008 will be on producing new resources for schools that will be closely
aligned to the school statistics curriculum. For more information see:
http://www.censusatschool.org.nz/.
Doctoral Thesis in Statistics Education. Tim Burgess,
Massey University recently completed his EdD thesis entitled Investigating
the nature of teacher knowledge needed and used in teaching statistics.
His research centred on teachers of Years 6 to 8 students.
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