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This paper deals with the attitudes which students bring with them into statistics courses and which influence the processes of teaching and learning.

At its August 1992 meeting in Boston, the Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics (CATS) noted widespread sentiment in the statistical community that upper-level undergraduate and graduate curricula for statistics majors and postdoctoral training for statisticians are currently structured in ways that do not provide sufficient exposure to modern statistical analysis, computational and graphical tools, communication skills, and the ever-growing interdisciplinary uses of statistics. Approaches and materials once considered standard are being rethought. The growth that statistics has undergone is often not reflected in the education that future statistician receive. There is a need to incorporate more meaningfully into the curriculum the computational and graphical tools that are today so important to many professional statisticians. There is a need for improved training of statistics students in written and oral communication skills, which are crucial for effective interaction with scientists and policy makers. More realistic experience is needed in various application areas for which statistics is now a key to further progress. In response to this sentiment, CATS initiated a project on modern interdisciplinary university statistics education. With support from the National Science Foundation, CATS organized and held a one-and-one-half-day symposium on that topic in conjunction with the August 1993 San Francisco Joint Statistical Meetings. The symposium's focus was what changes in statistics education are needed to (1) incorporate interdisciplinary training into the upper-undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral statistics programs, (2) bring the upper-undergraduate and graduate statistics curricula up to date, and (3) improve apprenticing of statistics graduate and postdoctoral students and appropriately reward faculty mentors. These proceedings have been compiled to capture the timely and important presentations and discussions that took place at that symposium. It should be noted that the opinions expressed in this volume are those of the speakers of discussants and do not necessarily represent the views of CATS or of the National Research Council.

This paper describes a National Science foundation (NSF) Sponsored Teacher Enhancement Program (TEP) in statistics during the years 1991 - 1994 conducted at the University of Puerto Rico. The project evolved from the belief that statistics is more meaningful to students when they plan, experiment, collect and analyze data themselves rather than when they learn a set of formulas and techniques. This idea was first incorporated locally in an NSF Sponsored Young Scholars Program in statistics during the period 1989 - 1991 in which the author worked with talented students from high schools in the region. The experience and success of the Young Scholars Program and the education department's request to expand it led to the TEP in statistics presented herein. There are three special features of this project. The first feature is to introduce the modern method of teaching statistical reasoning to students primarily through the use of examples and class projects which are interesting to students and related to current issues. A second important feature is the comprehensive nature of training in the fields of statistics, computers and research methodology. the third important characteristic is the three year follow up phase of the project which provided time to integrate the philosophy of the project into the educational system.

Because of the direct link between a country's socio-economic conditions and its system of education, there exist enormous differences between the educational systems of the developed and the underdeveloped countries. Consequently, the quality of statistical education in developing countries varies, both in courses and teaching methods. As such, there cannot be a uniform strategy for educational improvement in various parts of the world. Efforts to improve the quality of education in any country will necessarily have to take into account its economic and socio-cultural realities and, as such, there is a need for developing an in-depth understanding of the socio-economic conditions of various countries of the world. This paper presents a review of the existing situation of statistical education in Pakistan. Various problems have been highlighted, the objective being to assist the International Statistical Institute in developing a deeper understanding of difficulties associated with statistical education in some of the underdeveloped countries.