Dedicated Education Afternoon Aimed at Teachers

Sessions are set aside for Statistics Education on the afternoon of Wednesday 4 July. We hope you will be able to attend and enjoy this afternoon revolving around statistics education.

The afternoon is aimed at teachers of statistics, with a mixture of contributed presentations. The majority of the presentations will provide datasets and the stories that go with them, which teachers can set their students to work on.

The sessions will also include a presentation on the new curriculum and possible changes, from the view of NZSA members who have taken an interest in the development of its statistics strand.

Data presenters will provide a dataset and its story, and these will be available by disk and internet to teachers. Each presenter will discuss the context of their dataset, with some of their analysis and conclusions.

These presentations will be useful first to teachers of NCEA Level 3 Statistics and Modelling, but they will be of interest to teachers at any level in secondary and primary school.

The presenters will come from researchers who work with real data, at organisations such as universities, government departments like Department of Conservation and Statistics New Zealand, and research institutes.

There is a special reduced fee of $20 for teachers attending just the education sessions - to cover afternoon tea and related overheads (e.g. room fees). Please use the registration page.

You are also very welcome to join us for the Conference Dinner.

Instructions for Presenters

Datasets and their stories are extremely useful for teachers, who can use them to make statistics valued and seen as vital. They are extremely hard for teachers to find, especially if teachers want fresh local produce!

The datasets can be unit-record case or series datasets. If they are case datasets, they would ideally contain two or more numerical variable (with interesting relationships), and possibly one or more categorical variables.

The stories for the dataset should say where the dataset came from, why it was collected, what the variables mean, and how the data could be analysed. All analyses should be validated by graphs of the data.

Please provide the dataset, with adequate documentation i.e. the story behind the dataset and, suggestions for exploration, analysis and activities, including user- friendly variable names, preferably in Excel and/or text format, on a public website or in electronic format for distribution on 4 July. Please send this to Ian Westbrooke by Friday 29 June.

We will aim to collect the datasets together on a CD to be distributed at the session. The preferred format is: an Excel spreadsheet, with these following sheets:

  • Readme, with names and definitions of variables, etc; contents of workbook;
  • Dataset, with variable names on first line, and no blank lines within the data region;
  • Background, the story - origins, suggestions for exploration, analysis and activities and possibly some conclusions, graphs and comments;

Any presentation, with its associated dataset and story, is likely to take some effort. However, the benefits to teacher, students and statistical education are very positive.


NZSA 2007 Team