Proceedings

In 1974, one of the authors (GAFS) introduced a terminating first year service course in statistics, paper 26.181, for non-mathematics students. In the following years we observed that the service course 26.181 catered not only for students majoring in other subjects, but also for a substantial number of mathematics students who preferred a more practical approach than the traditional one. The numbers were also steadily growing (about 1500 in 1990). At that stage we realised that 26.181 provided a potential source of advancing statistics students who might be interested in taking a second year follow-up course. In the 1980s Alan Lee (and probably most of us that vintage) had been strongly influenced by works on exploratory data analysis by such people as Tukey , McNeil, Velleman and Hoaglin. Under Lee's direction a second year data analysis course 26.281 was launched in 1981. His aim was to provide further training in practical statistics and data analysis without requiring too much mathematical knowledge or statistical theory. He realised that the students needed easy computer access for a realistic approach to data analysis. Suitable access to a mainframe was out of the question at the time, but micros seemed a viable alternative. A suitable statistical package was therefore developed called STATCALC (Lee et al., 1984) which had partly evolved from several programs on exploratory data analysis adapted from McNeil (1977) by Ross Ihaka. The package runs on IBM and Macintosh personal computers, the latter being currently used in our department. Lee and Peter Mullins also wrote a manual to go with the package. The manual, with its extensive tutorial section, also serves as the text for the course.

We have found spreadsheets very useful for teaching statistics, operations research, and other quantitative methods in commerce: students learn quickly when typing and debugging formulae and macros, and get a real feeling for the relation between computation and theory. However, after a while, it is necessary to turn to a more traditional statistical package to find both standard and advanced procedures needed for real-world data examination. WESTAT Associates has developed the MASS system for some years, a stand-alone statistical package of some size and power, and we have used it extensively for teaching, at second course but not at introductory level. In the past six months we (1.5 persons) have ported it to sit on the new spreadsheet WingZ (by Informix Inc) on the Mac to form a new program StatZ, which combines the advantages of a spreadsheet and a specialised program for the teaching and practice of statistics. (See Section 3(ii) for other computers.) Porting a program from one language or machine or system to another is usually a painful exercise. However, the power and flexibility of the "scripting" and of the facilities for linking external code provided by WingZ and its HyperScript macro language, which we have used for incorporating our MASS code into their highly commercial, well-tested base product, seems destined to have a profound effect on related areas of program development. This will yield new research and teaching software, as already pioneered by Apple's HyperCard, the technical precursor of WingZ's HyperScript.

While the emphasis in tertiary education in Australia in the past has been on pre-employment training, the rapid expansion in knowledge has meant that there is an increased need to provide graduates with the opportunity to continue their education. This will often be in areas to which they have had minimal exposure in their undergraduate course. Such is the case with Arts graduates, most of whom will have had at best only a basic introduction to statistics and little opportunity to become computer literate. One way of providing this continuing education is through short courses. These are appropriate when the training needs are limited and well defined. Often a more substantial form of training is needed and this has been the motivation for the development of the Post Graduate Diploma in Social Statistics that is described in this paper.

Knowledge of statistics is important in the curricula of students in psychology and education. Reasons are twofold. First, in other courses they deal with theories and research studies which rely on statistical analysis. Second, they have to undertake research in which they have to handle, analyse and interpret data. Statistics is for these students a tool, a means of communicating knowledge which is needed to read and evaluate surveys, experiments, and other studies dealing with substantive problems in the field of psychology and education; and is also used in doing research while planning a study, analysing the data, and interpreting the results. Both aspects rely on a knowledge base of statistics and of methodology; the second also requires competence in problem-solving skills.