Statistical agencies follow the UN Principles of Official Statistics, which set high standards of practice and ethics. The question is posed as to whether current practices meet these high standards, with some topical examples relating to Indigenous statistics and disability statistics. Some important messages for the teachers of statisticians are then drawn out, covering some practical and ethical issues for those who work, or will work, in statistical agencies.
South African society emerges from a political legacy that strove to create a dysfunctional society by implementing an official policy of racial discrimination, the effects of which can be observed in education, wealth distribution, employment, and settlement patterns amongst others. Therefore the challenge of statistical literacy is not only improving levels of competency in economics, science and technology, but also to address basic literacy and numeracy. An impressive budget allocation to education in recent times has helped primary education, but less for senior school where drop-out rates are high. An even much bigger challenge is adult illiteracy. In his address to the nation, the President emphasised the need for economic literacy in South Africa. The basic ingredient for this is statistical literacy; thus enhancing knowledge of mathematics and statistics can begin to address deficiencies in economic literacy. While there are programs for training statisticians, this paper confines itself largely to the broad based statistics awareness raising programmes.
Since its formation in 1993, the International Association for Statistical Education, IASE, has become a very active international organisation which aims to advance statistical education at all levels, from primary school through training of professionals as well as to the general, public. From 1949 the Committee on Statistical Education within the International Statistical Institute, ISI, promoted the university training of Statisticians at an international level while in developing countries the ISI concerned itself with the education of official statisticians. From the mid 1970's the ISI began to pay more attention to the teaching of statistics at all levels. Since the IASE became a section of the ISI in 1993 it has been responsible for the organisation of all statistical education activities run by the ISI. These include a research group, a range of international meetings, regular publications and a comprehensive website.
We live in changing times! The 21st century is fast becoming an age of assessment, of quality assurance - and of accountability. What does this all mean for the professional statistician? It means that potential clients need assurance of "professional competence". It also requires that this "professional competence", once achieved, is maintained in the light of advancements in both technical and analytical tools. This paper will illustrate the philosophical underpinning of the CPD process which will be implemented and used by the Royal Statistical Society as a vehicle to ensure the maintenance of professional standards within the statistical profession, in support of its professional status award of Chartered Statistician (CStat.). The paper will also seek to initiate and encourage a continuing rational debate between Academic Statisticians (who are increasingly being encouraged to generate commercial revenue for their universities) and practising commercial statisticians (who are increasingly finding academic developments in statistics irrelevant for their current needs).
This paper describes the role of the Royal Statistical Society in shaping statistical education within the UK and further afield. Until 2001 the Society had four agencies concerned with education at all levels. The work of these is discussed and recent new arrangements are outlined. The Society's efforts to disseminate good practice through organising meetings and running a network of Associate Schools and College are explored in some detail.
Teaching statistics to students aspiring to other professions can be both frustrating and rewarding. The frustration arises from (a) having limited time to cover everything from introductory to advanced material, (b) receiving little input from staff in the client profession, (c) the concepts of unpredictability and randomness being alien to students' thinking, particularly for engineering students, and (d) students not having the background knowledge or skills necessary to understand the methods fully. The reward comes from seeing students understand both basic and advanced concepts and methods, and from requests for assistance with later work as former students discover the relevance of statistics. This paper will address some methods used to overcome the frustration and to enhance the rewards in teaching a first course in statistics to engineering students. Although situations vary, these ideas will hopefully provide helpful tools.
Even the best engineering undergraduates often have little enthusiasm for our statistics courses. Some of their disinterest is really traceable not just to a skepticism about whether using our apparently boring methods will help them be better engineers, but to an even more fundamental ignorance of what engineers do and what kinds of environments they work in. Where a statistician has the luxury of giving a second course in engineering statistics (like a statistical quality control (SQC) course), some part of that course can be aimed at providing not just statistical methodology, but also a proper context for that methodology. This paper discusses ideas in this direction, some of which I have used in an SQC course for industrial engineering students and are documented at http://www.public.iastate.edu/~vardeman/IE361/ie361vard.html,a course Web page, and others of which I am still thinking about how to utilize.
Using real life examples in Introductory Statistics courses is now accepted as very desirable and even necessary. There are many resources available on the Internet and elsewhere that makes this particularly easy. In this paper we discuss some advantages of using homegrown examples, obtained mainly from consulting work. However, to be able to use these examples in undergraduate courses they must be framed in such a way that the students can understand them. We also give a number of examples where we have done this.
This paper introduces an outline of the integrated web site produced from our faculties' project offering such services as statistics education, electronic books, and statistical libraries for computer use with a search engine for statistics, which we are currently developing. Statistics is a basic and cross-disciplinary study that should be applied to positive analysis in a wide variety of fields. Both the theoretical side and the practical use as a data analysis tool have to be its primary role. Moreover developing statistical analysis software has been the mainstream of disseminating statistics to the various departments. Computers and its network have become quite popular, still use of data processing software such as spreadsheets is expanding among people in the society. In this circumstance, strong demand for basic statistics education is absolutely increasing. In addition as the Internet is supposed to grow as a large-scale communication media, now and in the future, beyond time and space, to increase information about statistical science and education on the Internet promotes the efficient dissemination of statistics.
This paper handles the use of technology in teaching statistics at the college level. It distinguishes between teaching statistics at an introductory level in core courses, and integrating statistics as "tools" in different disciplines, and teaching statistics as a science for specialized students. Teaching objectives are different for each category, and thus teaching methods should also be different. While stress is given to computations and how they are done using calculators in some classes, emphasis is given to concepts and their meanings in others where the use of technology promotes active learning, enhances the teaching objectives which in turn influences the method statistics is taught and introduced.