This paper addresses the importance of making both the women's and the men's worlds visible. Women and men should always be presented side by side in statistics. From that it is possible to judge if women and men are both visible to the same extent in the real world in all areas of society and to evaluate how far we have reached concerning the quantitative aspect of equal opportunity.
In the secondary schools, statistics, above other branches of mathematics, is proving attractive to female students. What happens then when this substantial proportion of young women come to university - do they continue to study statistics and do they succeed at it?
Women biostatisticians in New Zealand are a substantial proportion of a very small group of statisticians. The term "biostatisticians" refers to statisticians who work on research projects in the area of medical or health research. They are usually attached to schools of medicine where they provide consultancy services and teaching, although some are employed to work on large projects or within research units.
The paper considers the place of qualitative research in education, examining the significance of social context as a source of meaning for classroom processes. Ethnographic research methodology is considered as an approach to answering the question "What is happening when young children are working independently as part of a mathematics programme in a junior classroom?". There is strong potential for this methodology in classroom-based research.
Filipinos are natural gamblers; we bet on anything and everything besides horses. Our perception of risk is often irrational. We are subjected to opinion polls provided by the media, without being able to question the accuracy of their reports. As such, we need to understand some of the ideas of probability and frequencies. Understanding statistics is important for individuals in their daily lives and, as citizens in a democratic society, statistics must be taught directly or integrated in the teaching of science or other courses, especially at the lower levels of education where only a minority ever reach college. The question asked: How effective is the teaching of statistics in the Philippines?
A brief reflection on the experiences of a New Zealand woman statistician. Comments were made on the value of formal and informal training in the academic environment, the issues and problems faced upon moving to a private sector position (in insurance), and the potentially valuable contribution of statistics and statisticians to the management decision-making process.
This paper describes a course aimed at mature age students who are lacking in basic mathematical skills and who are anxious about mathematics but who are required to do a service course in statistics. The course aims to improve basic skills and attitudes to mathematics and, in addition, to move students from a rule-based approach to mathematics and statistics to a more flexible one. Flexibility in mathematical thinking is required if students at a later stage are to be able to consider and assess the relative merits of different ways of analysing batches of data. Basic skills and attitudes both before and after the course have been measured using an author-prepared test for the former and an attitude to mathematics [Fennema] test for the latter. Mathematical thinking has been measured by using material based on the SOLO (Structure of the Learned Outcome) taxonomy. There has been some evidence of a change in basic skills and attitudes to mathematics over the duration of the course, but to date there has not been an accompanying change in the level of mathematical thinking.
In the following paper, I shall investigate a fundamental relationship with regard to the particular conditions of in-service training and to the requirements of appropriate teaching material for statistics. Everything I shall describe and the material I shall present is the result of a cooperative project between mathematics teachers and researchers for the development of statistical material suitable for the in-service training and the everyday lesson planning of teachers.
This paper will document four instruments devised to assess student understanding of statistical concepts. Two are intended for large scale administration and two are for individual interviews.
States and local schools face the implementation of the Chance and Data part of a curriculum with no Australian research base from which to make recommendations for the preparation of teachers or for the suggestion of methods and topics realistic to the developmental level of the students. It is the purpose of this paper to suggest such a base.