Success and failure in statistical education - A UK perspective

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.