Proceedings

  • Statistical educators do not always agree on whether the real roots of statistics lie in theory or applications, and so will not always concur on what constitutes success and failure in Statistical Education. Students' understanding should be developed to include both aspects, but statistical education programmes still emphasise the manipulation rather than the development of relevant statistical models, and students therefore have great difficulty relating theory to application. Changes in technology, and hence in professionals', and now increasingly lay-persons', practice of statistics, have made our views of statistical education unclear. Delegates at the International Statistical Institute's Round Table Conference, "Training Teachers to Teach Statistics" (Budapest, 1988), had difficulty determining training priorities because what teachers should or would teach was not clearly defined.

  • The core concept, around which all statistics teaching should be based, is probability. The basic ideas of probability and utility should be taught to everyone, because every citizen is forced to make decisions in an uncertain world.

  • The NSF-funded Quantitative Literacy Project (QLP), a joint project of the American Statistical Association (ASA) and the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM), served as the basis from which the strand in statistics was developed for the NCTM Standards. The QLP provides curriculum materials in certain areas of data exploration, probability, and inference, in a style that makes the material accessible to teachers and students, and provides a model framework for in-service programmes to enhance the skills of teachers in the area of statistics and probability. More specific information on certain aspects of the QLP will be provided below.

  • The main focus of the second Quantitative Literacy Project was to provide secondary teachers with a week-long workshop on the quantitative literacy materials and on techniques to use in teaching those materials. The participants modelled the roles of students and the staff the role of the teacher, using techniques that could be transported to a secondary school classroom. One unique aspect of the workshops was the involvement of professionals statisticians contacted through the local ASA chapters who served as speakers, provided on-site visits and were role models for those interested in statistics as a profession. Another key element was to involve participants in planning, designing and carrying out a project with the guidance of one of the statisticians.

  • I will describe here the plans of the American Association for the Advancement of Science to incorporate basic ideas of statistics into K-12 curricula that more or less integrate science, technology, and mathematics. Rather than adding simply statistics topics to the curriculum, the curriculum design involves a mapping of ideas in these fields as they interconnect and increase in sophistication.

  • Data analysis can play an important role in bridging the gap between the world of mathematics and the student's world experience. Students study functions in class, but seldom have the opportunity to see these functions and their interactions exhibited in the world around them. As the students study the behavior of functions in calculus and precalculus courses, they learn how things should happen in theory. Through data analysis, the theory can be motivated and realised in the actual. The principles of curve fitting, re-expression, and residual analysis, offer a very exciting and enlightening basis for the motivation and derivation of many of the functions and functional concepts taught in high school algebra and in calculus. The Mathematics Department at the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics has created, tested, and published an innovative data-driven precalculus text and is presently writing a calculus course involving many laboratory experiences from which the examples in this article are taken.

  • Our experiences with high school students have indicated that statistical concepts can be introduced meaningfully into the secondary curriculum by integrating them not only into the existing mathematics curriculum, but also into other non-mathematics subjects. Curricula must be changed to reduce the amount of material covered and to focus on fewer basic concepts that can be applied to a wide variety of problem situations in the real world. Statistical and other scientific approaches to problem-solving should play an important role in the education of all students.

  • What follows are some suggestions upon module developments designed to provide problem-solving experiences in developing a sequence of trigonal,numerical arrays, JE(n), which in turn give rise to sequences of discrete, fair probability spaces, P(m(JE(n))), with practical suggestions for open-ended model building. Hopefully these module developments will give some insight into teaching and learning some aspects of problem-solving, as well as naturally generating probability spaces which are discrete and fair. The intent is that the module will contribute to the student's overall ability to understand probability and statistics at a more mature level of sophistication. These ideas were initiated about 1983 by the author, have been field tested with two groups of fifth grade students successfully, and many teachers at the public school level and university level have benefited from workshops based upon these modules.

  • This paper summarises the work done on the National Science Foundation sponsored Young Scholars' Programme on Statistics for secondary school students in Puerto Rico.

  • What's needed to excite interest in mathematics? We've found a common approach useful both in industry and the schools. Focussing on open-ended problems reveals both the practical impact of quantitative thinking and the role advanced numerical methods play in improving the quality of decisions. Using examples drawn from industry, a framework will be provided to introduce statistical thought into asking questions and getting answers.

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