Through its NSF funded Quantitative Literacy Project, the Joint Committee has developed teacher training programs and curriculum materials that are now being used throughout the country. The influence of these materials and methods extends far beyond a few classrooms, as many educational organizations look to them for guidance in establishing state and national guidelines on teaching statistics.
This report consists of excerpts from a paper entitled "The Religion of Statistics?" and discusses writing papers in statistics courses.
In April 1983, the Madison Commission on Excellence in Education reported that we are a "Nation at Risk" in that we are setting for mediocrity in education and that our students are insufficiently prepared in mathematics, science, and other related areas. This report included the recommendation that high school students must be equipped to understand probability and statistics. In Educating Americans for the Twenty-First Century, the National Science Board on Precollege Education in Mathematics, Science and Technology (1983) expressed its concern that "statistics and probability should now be considered fundamental for all high school students." The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics' Agenda for Action: Recommendations for School Mathematics of the 1980's concluded that school mathematics must focus on problem solving and should integrate "the problem-solving capabilities of the computer" into the classroom in order "to implement new strategies of interaction and simulation.
This report describes a project that was organized to prepare teams of people to become change agents in their districts and in the profession of statistics.
This paper will describe applications of reforms proposed for college mathematics for teaching introductory statistics to prospective high school mathematics teachers.
This interview was conducted for JSE at the Harvard Department of Statistics on December 18, 1992. The topics discussed include the history and future of statistics education, the use of video and computers in teaching statistics, the role of data analysis in statistics textbooks, innovation in the classroom, and graduate education.
This paper considers the changes in teaching statistics prompted by this new cultural awareness. First the bilingual classroom is briefly characterised, followed by a description of two forces for change: ethnomathematics and Maori cultural renaissance. The link with the emerging holistic, active approach to statistics is then detailed. Finally the issues of Maori vocabulary, teacher education and course assessment are discussed.
I believe that Maori research can benefit immensely through the incorporation of a fuller range of appropriate quantitative methods to enhance the general qualitative approach to research problems adopted in this field. In the first part of this paper I outlined some of the strategies used in investigating problems relating to Maori language and cultural issues and suggested ways of applying statistical methods (where possible) to augment the analyses of the available data. In the second part of the paper I discussed a particular piece of research that I am currently involved in which looks at attitudes of bilingual speakers to spoken Maori. I attempted to demonstrate how the use of factor analysis and bi-plot graphs provide an interesting way of summarising and viewing the data which would not be possible without the use of these statistical techniques.
The institutional statistics for Maori today presents a somewhat dismal picture. It is argued that in large part this is due to the obscuration of the history (and statistics) of Maori communities since early European contact. Some of this history was outlined. Also, the use of computers (which are a well-known statistical tool) in the newly-forming Iwi Authorities was touched on.
The statistics teacher is a very rare breed in England. Statistics is a relatively recent addition to our school curriculum and is still treated very much as an application of mathematics. There is, however, a small, but hopefully growing, band of enthusiastic teachers who wish to become better teachers of statistics. They find themselves enjoying the statistics teaching which is creeping into schools particularly following the introduction of a compulsory National Curriculum which includes "Data Handling" as one of its topics. Very few of the teachers will have studied statistics beyond school level and fewer still will have had any training in how best to teach the subject. At The Centre for Statistical Education we have always been concerned to promote and improve the teaching of statistics, and we decided that one of the ways in which we could do this was to offer a postgraduate Diploma in Statistics and Statistical Education, a dual course which attempts to improve the teachers' understanding of statistics itself as well as explaining ways of improving their teaching of the subject.