Literature Index

Some examples from the teaching proposal, elaborated by us, for the subject "Statistical and Numerical Methods" (SNM) are presented. SNM is an optional course in the last year of High School in Galicia (Spain). More specifically, we are concerned with the introduction of some new concepts at this teaching level in the Galician education system, namely, Markov chains, statistical inference and time series.

Many tertiary institutions now include 'Data Mining' as a topic in their Statistics curriculum,<br>both at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. The choice of software for learning the topic of<br>Data Mining is an interesting issue to think about. There is a wide range of such software<br>available, from commercially popular ones such as SAS/Enterprise Miner, Statistica/Data Miner<br>and S-plus/Insightful Miner to free ones such as R and Weka. The main aim of this paper is to<br>discuss the pros and cons of such software, including their capabilities to handle and manipulate<br>large volumes data, all from a teaching/learning point of view at both introductory and more<br>advanced levels.

That women on the average tend to suffer from math anxiety and to perform less well in advanced mathematics classes, when they are found there at all, are repeatedly documented facts that operate as highly effective barriers to women's achievement in a variety of domains. As a math anxious individual, I avoided all math in high school and agonized through the necessary courses as a traditionally aged student in college, and again as a returning student in graduate school. It seems ironic that one of the first courses I instituted when I became a college professor at a small liberal arts college for women was an introductory statistics course. Social psychology is my discipline, however, and one of the changes I noted between the time I earned my bachelors degree in 1964 and the time I entered graduate school in 1977 was that women had become a great deal more visible in psychology, even powerful in some instances. It seemed to me that many of these women also tended to be first-rate statisticians; in fact, rather than being intimidated by numbers, these women were actually using sophisticated statistics to help write women back into psychology. I decided to do what I could to work through my own math anxiety, and, in turn, to try to teach statistics in such a way that others, regardless of their discipline, would find the subject approachable, useful, even fun from their first exposure at the college level. In the beginning, I conceived of the course as simply taking a math-anxious approach. As time has gone by, I have learned more about Feminism as a philosophy/ideology and have begun to recognize that what I had called a math-anxious approach to statistics was actually a Feminist approach. With that recognition, I have begun to apply those principles even more consciously.

The Mathematics Learning Study committee offers a promising mechanism for helping those concerned with school mathematics begin to use the available research more productively. The committee of practitioners, research mathematicians, cognitive psychologists, researchers in mathematics education, and a representative from the business community was convened by the National Research Council to synthesize the research on preK-8 mathematics learning to provide recommendations for best practice in the early years of schooling. Committee members applied the criteria of relevance, soundness, and generalizability in examining the evidence on mathematics learning and looked for a body of evidence that converged on a single point and that made good common and theoretical sense among the research studies that met those criteria for a given topic. A consensus had to be reached on the studies that would be cited in the draft report and the language that would be used to describe them. The entire draft was then reviewed by 15 independent reviewers.