AP Stat Reading, CAUSE Webinar and a New Book

Auja Bjornsdottir, Jiyoon Park, Michelle Everson, and Laura Ziegler participated in the A.P. Statistics reading in June. All except Laura were Acorns and the rumor is that they didn't take part in a skit. For more information about the A.P. Statistics course, visit the College Board website [Click Here]. You can also find out more about the A.P. reading at the following:

• The AP Reading Experience
• Life as an "Acorn": My Experience as a First-Time AP Statistics Reader

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Rebekah Isaak, Laura Le, and Laura Ziegler also gave a webinar for CAUSE on the CATALST course in June. 

This webinar provides an overview of the research foundations of a radically different introductory statistics course: the CATALST course. This course teaches students the skills they need in order to truly cook with statistics, not just the procedures they need in order to follow a statistical recipe. In addition to the research foundations of the course, we will describe unique aspects of this course as well as details of a one-year teaching experiment to learn how this course can be taught and its impact on student learning.

You can view the webinar, Create an Iron Chef in statistics classes?, on CAUSEweb.

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Lastly, Springer has recently published the book Teaching Statistics in School Mathematics–Challenges for Teaching and Teacher Education. The book, which was edited by Carmen Batanero, Gail Burrill, and Chris Reading, is the product of a joint collaboration between the International Commission on Mathematical Instruction (ICMI) and the International Association for Statistical Education (IASE). It is also a product of the 2008 IASE Roundtable Conference. Joan Garfield and Chris Franklin co-authored a chapter in the book. The book, which is also available through Amazon [click here], is described on the Springer website as follows:

In recent years, there have been an expansion and renewal of the statistics content in the mathematics curricula in many countries through all school grade levels from primary to secondary levels. However, no similar attention has been paid to the preparation of mathematics teacher to teach statistics at these levels. This book presents the results from the Joint ICMI/IASE Study, Teaching Statistics in School Mathematics. Challenges for Teaching and Teacher Education that was  intended to address the lack of attention  to teaching statistics by promoting international collaborative  research specifically focussed on the education and professional development of teachers to teach statistics.The volume covers a very wide field, including examples of statistics curricula and teacher education programmes around the world; analysis of the fundamentals to teaching statistics;  survey chapters of research related to teachers’ attitudes, beliefs and knowledge related to fundamental statistics ideas and its teaching; and analyses of challenges and experiences related to training teachers to teach statistics. The book is designed to be useful to researchers in mathematics education and statistics education teacher educators,  and people involved in curricular development in statistics with the hope that it will foster further research in the problems related to educating teachers to teach statistics at different school levels. It could be of interest to teachers themselves, since the basic ideas for teaching statistics and the research summarised  in the book both in learning difficulties or teaching strategies is applicable in both the training of students and teachers.

USCOTS 2011 Pictures

Catalysts for Change all in one spot at the same time (almost!)
From left: Joan Garfield, Laura Le, Elizabeth, Michelle Everson, Rebekah Isaak, Audbjorg Bjornsdottir, Laura Ziegler, Jiyoon Park, Matt Beckman, Bob delMas, and Andy Zieffler

Bob delMas admires a slide during his plenary talk.

All of the CAUSE Lifetime Achievement award winners.
From left: Roxy Peck, Dick Scheaffer, Joan Garfield, and George Cobb

Bob delMas explains some of the finer points of qualitative research.

Michelle Everson explains "it is twitter...not tweeter".

USCOTS 2011

Adeline ponders the "next big thing".

The 4th United States Conference on Teaching Statistics was held May 19-21 in Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina. Once again, Catalysts for Change were busy throughout the conference. Here is just an overview of some of the things that we participated in:

• Bob delMas gave a plenary talk, It Takes a Village: Future Directions for Statistics Education Research. [Download his slides here.] 
• Michelle Everson co-presented a breakout session, Using Social Media and Technology to Engage the Next Generation of Statistics Students.
• Audbjorg Bjornsdottir co-presented a breakout session, Rethinking Assessment in the Digital Age.
• Andy Zieffler and Bob delMas co-presented a breakout session, Introduction to Qualitative Research Methods in Statistics Education Research.
• Rebekah Isaak, Laura Le, Jiyoon Park, Matt Beckman, Lisa Lendway, and Laura Ziegler conducted validation interviews for two assessment projects
• Rebekah Isaak, Laura Le, Laura Ziegler, Bob delMas and Andy Zieffler gave technology demonstrations using TinkerPlots, R, and R-Tools during the breakout session, Technology for Teaching Bootstraps and Randomizations.
• Joan Garfield, Bob delMas and Andy Zieffler met with the other members of the CAUSE Research Advisory Board (RAB) to graduate the 2009/2010 research clusters and to begin to plan for  future endeavors of the RAB.
• Many of the Catalysts for Change participated in the CAUSE meeting
• The youngest Catalyst for Change, Adeline (see photo) participated in her first USCOTS by attending the banquet held at the beautiful SAS campus.

Whew! I'm sure I missed some things, but those are the highlights. Pics to be posted soon.

Last Stat Chat of the 2010/2011 Academic Year

The last Stat Chat of the 2010/2011 academic year is set for Tuesday April 21, 2011. Stat Chat is an informal, but informative, monthly get-together of local statistics educators. We meet in room 205 of the Olin-Rice Science Center at Macalester College [See Map].

The agenda for this Stat Chat is as follows:

• 6:00 - 6:30, Dinner and presentation of two draft posters for USCOTS
• 6:30 - 7:00, Journal Club: The Math-Stats Course (Laura Chihara)
• 7:00 - 8:00, Main Event: Statistical Literacy Update Updates on recent work and a preview of USCOTS (Milo Schield and Marc Isaacson)

During this month's journal club, we will discuss the math stats course including, what the goals of a math stats course should be, and the topics that are essential to this course. To guide the discussion, consider the table of contents from these two books:

• Larsen and Marx, An Introduction to Mathematical Statistics and Its Applications
• Chihara and Hesterberg, Mathematical Statistics with Resampling and R

In the first part of the main discussion, Milo Schield will discuss Models and Assumptions: Statistics and Assembly. Checking assumptions is a critical activity in modeling. Often times the assumptions used in analyzing data influence — if not determine — the results. Milo will discuss an ISI draft paper that argues that statistics have the same status as models — they involve choices in assembly that influence — if not determine — the results. One of the five elements of the AACU 2009 Quantitative Literacy Rubric was assumptions:

Ability to make and evaluate important assumptions in estimation, modeling, and data analysis.

The ISI paper extends this focus on assumptions to include the formation of categories, measures and summary statistics. While statistics may have little to say about which assumptions are best, statistical literacy can highlight how choices in how groups are defined or how quantities are measured can influence the results.

In the second part of the main event, Marc Isaacson will present the USCOTS Theater-teaching activity: Multiple choice Olympic Success. This activity incorporates audience involvement to evaluate data from Olympic Competition results through the use of rankings. While rankings are commonly encountered by students in their everyday life, they are rarely discussed in an introductory statistics class. Audience members will be presented a handout, a single question and then asked to respond via text message or smartphone. Results will be collected via the internet and discussed instantaneously with an interesting twist.

Lastly, Milo Schield will present the USCOTS Theater-teaching activity: Where do Statistics come from? This activity incorporates audience involvement to compare related rates or percentages. Central question: Where do statistics come from; how are they assembled; what difference do their definitions make in their size or in the size of their association?

PLEASE RSVP to Danny Kaplan so that we can plan sensibly for dinner. As always, last-minute deciders and guests are welcome.

CATALST Presentation at NCTM Research Presession

Zieffler presents on CATALST. On
the screen is Robin Lock, Joan Garfield
and Robert delMas.

Andrew Zieffler recently presented at the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics Research Presession in Indianapolis, IN. The presentation, entitled It Takes a Village to Effect Change: The CATALST Course Teaching Experiment [PDF version of the slides], documents a two-semester teaching experiment currently being undertaken as part of the NSF-funded CATALST grant (DUE-0814433).

Zieffler presented this work in an invited session, Research in Statistics Education: Current Efforts and Future Directions, organized by James Tarr (University of Missouri). Other participants in the session included Randall E. Groth (Salisbury University), Sandra Madden (University of Massachusetts Amherst), and Tim Jacobbe (University of Florida). The session also included two discussants, Hollylynne Stohl Lee (North Carolina State University), and Rich Lehrer (Vanderbilt University).

For more information related to the CATALST grant:

• Download the slides of the NCTM presentation [PDF]
• Visit the CATALST website [Website]

Michelle Everson Receives Waller Award

Michelle Everson

Michelle Everson, lecturer in the Department of Educational Psychology, has received the 2011 American Statistical Association Waller Education Award in recognition of her outstanding contributions to and innovation in the teaching of elementary statistics. Nominees for the Waller must be early in their career, with 10 or fewer years of full-time teaching and responsibility for teaching the first course in statistics in a two- or four-year college, or research university. The award will be presented to Everson at the Joint Statistical Meetings in Miami Beach this summer.

Congratulations Michelle!

Statistics Education Paper Published in JRSS

The Journal of the Royal Statistical Society (Series A) has published a statistic education paper written by Chris Wild, Maxine Pfannkuch, Matt Regan and Nick Horton. The paper is being made available for free by Wiley for a limited time period. [Access the paper here.]

The paper is titled Towards More Accessible Conceptions of Statistical Inference and includes discussions by John MacInnes, Peter Holmes, Adrian Bowman, Jim Ridgway, John Pullinger, James Nicholson, Thomas King and Clare M. Woodford, Julian Stander and Rana Moyeed, Ramesh Kapadia, Alan Agresti, Janet Ainley and Dave Pratt, Murray Aitken, Adrian Baddeley, Manfred Borovcnik, Mike Camden, Len Cook, Neville Davies, N. I. Fisher, Joan Garfield and Andrew Zieffler, Andrew Gelman, Harvey Goldstein, Robert Gould, Sander Greenland, Paul Hewson, Kuldeep Kumar, D. V. Lindley, Thomas A. Louis, Helen MacGillivray, Xiao-Li Meng, Deborah Nolan, Sastry Pantula and Ron Wasserstein, Emanuel Parzen, Brian Pink, J.-F. Plante and N. Reid, Donald B. Rubin, Richard L. Scheaffer, Milo Schield, Michael Stuart, and Dennis Trewin.