Literature Index

Statistics South Africa is the official supplier of statistics for the South African government. It supplies various types of statistics to government departments, industry, financial houses as well as economic and developmental planners. Being an organisation where many subject experts are employed and where transfer of knowledge takes place, it is only natural to see that the quality of the organisation lies in its people and in the continual development of people's skills. SAS is the most widely used data management and statistical tool, especially in social and economic statistics. Training is provided as part of a well defined development plan that each employee has in terms of their position. Most of the training deals with data management and data manipulation as well as statistical analysis. It is intended that as people learn more that people will want to know more and the stage has been reached where features such as SQL and Macro Language amongst others are being trained. Training of Statistics can therefore take place with SAS being used as an analytical tool. Products such as SAS Analyst and Enterprise Guide allow the instructor to practically demonstrate the application of statistical techniques. Various different statistical procedures can be performed from simple descriptive statistics to complex inferential statistical procedures like data mining and time series analysis. Training of this nature goes hand in hand very effectively with the more theoretical type of statistical tuition that someone might receive elsewhere. However, if a trainee is able to see the link between the theoretical approach and the practical application thereof then everything becomes clearer, it stimulates the desire to learn more and everything falls into place. Skills development in South Africa is very important to the extent that legislation has enabled Statistics SA to be part of a Public Sector Education & Training Authority (PSETA). Through this Stats SA has proposed to create SAS learnerships, which would allow individuals to learn and apply knowledge gained by SAS in the workplace. Hence, this paper aims to show the value that the training and usage of SAS has to an organisation like Statistics SA and what new developments and initiatives can be pursued to further meet this aim.

SATS survey data collected from three introductory statistics courses - college algebra-based, college calculus-based, and a high school AP course. Instructors of these courses also completed a questionnaire concerning their approach to a 1st course in statistics. What are the similarities and differences in the students' attitudes to each instructor's approach?

Scoffoling refers to the instructional support that instructors or more skillful peers offer learners to bridge the gap between their current skill levels and the desired level. An aspect of scaffolding that is olften ignored is the fading of support as the learner masters the skill. It has been suggested that there is a risk of over-relying on the support of integrated media in computer-assisted instruction. A three-dimension (3-D) model of scaffolding that incorporates level of subtask, level of support, and number of repititions of practice has been proposed to vary the technology support systematically in response to the learner's performance. The 3-D contingent scaffolding model was implemented in a comptuer-based instructional program for statistics called "Hypothesis Testing--the Z-test" in order to establish baseline data for integrated media-based instruction or a hypermedia learning environment. The scaffolded instruction was evaluted in terms of knowledge maintenance and transfer by comparing it to full-support instruction and least-support instruction. Findings from 75 college students provide evidence that the scaffolded computer-based instruction promoted knowledge maintenance and improved independent knowledge application, while promoting learning consistently across individuals. Results also show that a dynamic measure of the learner's ability is a better predictor of the learning outcome for subjects using this scaffolded instruction than static measures. The model provides a systemic way to link the concept of scaffolding to integrated media design features using both support building and support fading techniques.

This paper focuses on developing students' informal ideas of inference and argumentative skills. This topic is of current interest to many researchers and teachers of statistics. We study fifth graders' learning processes in an exploratory interdisciplinary learning environment that usesTinkerPlots to scaffold and extend students' statistical reasoning. The careful design of the learning trajectory based on growing samples heuristics coupled with the unique features ofTinkerPlots were found instrumental in supporting students' multiplicative reasoning, aggregate reasoning, acknowledging the value of large samples, and accounting for variability. These processes were accompanied by greater ability to verbalize, explain and argue about data-based inferences. In the light of the analysis, a description of what it may mean to begin reasoning and arguing about inference by young students is proposed.