Statistics education in new zealand, and its influence on the iase

Abstract

For some time, New Zealand has been leading the world in terms of the focus and scope of its statistics curriculum in schools. The curriculum is characterised by its data handling, and in more recent years, data visualisation approach. In 2013 bootstrapping and randomisation will be added to the curriculum achievement objectives for the senior secondary school (Ministry of Education, 2012). This paper gives an historical perspective of the people and groups that have influenced the development of the New Zealand curriculum and outlines the influence and impact of some of these New Zealanders, such as Professors David Vere-Jones and Chris Wild together with Maxine Pfannkuch and John Harraway, on the International Association for Statistical Education (IASE). The roles of both the IASE and the local professional statisticians’ association, the New Zealand Statistical Association (NZSA), are discussed together with the possible long-term impact of new statistical literacy based school curriculum in New Zealand on tertiary statistics teaching.

From face-to-face teaching of official statistics to e-learning for the Sustainable Development Goals

“…univariate and bivariate measures of association, confidence intervals and interpretation of significance tests, the basics of demography, age standardisation and price indices). That is, the learning programme (course) contained both general statistics and an overview of official statistics [8,9] with as much use as possible made of resources freely available on the internet, such as statistics calculators, interactive tables, graphics and video material. The following four taught modules comprised 60% of the Certificate: The assessment was competency based (that is, learners were required to demonstrate that they had a certain level of understanding and skill and, within a given timeframe, could re-sit units) with no grades being awarded.…”

Collaboration and cooperation: the key to reaching out.

“…Figure 1: The overlap between official statisticians and statistics educators in New Zealand A key coordinating agent for the intersecting group is the New Zealand Statistical Association (NZSA) as almost all its members, both Statistics New Zealand staff and statistics educators, are members of this association forming strong collegial relationships through national conference attendance and committee work. A keynote address at one national conference discussed the interface between official statistics and statistics education (Forbes, 2009b). Since the inception of the association"s education subcommittee in 1986, NZSA has had strong involvement in the development of the New Zealand school statistics curriculum (Ministry of Education, 2008), regularly held teacher or education sessions at its national conferences and actively promoted discussion on education issues.…”

“…After four cohorts totalling 70 enrolments and over two years of experience the certificate was formally evaluated and the results reported in International Association of Statistical Education conferences (e.g. Forbes, 2009a). The fourth, and most recent, initiative is an honours/ masters paper in official statistics.…”

“…In New Zealand, there is evidence that senior state sector managers expect newly recruited staff to have attained basic statistical skills and knowledge in their university degrees (Forbes, 2011) so a mismatch between their expectation and reality exists. NAOS thought that an honours/ masters paper specifically in official statistics would be one step towards addressing this gap and provide a win-win situation for participating institutions if it was developed cooperatively, had teaching shared across universities and was delivered using new videoconferencing technology.…”

“…Statistics New Zealand"s concerns about the overall statistical capability of key user groups are based on anecdotal and research evidence. A lack of quantitatively skilled government policy staff was established by: a Victoria University of Wellington pilot study [qualitative interviews with 10 staff from 8 government departments (Macky & Saffron, April 2004)]; Statistics New Zealand consultation with statisticians and policy managers in 12 agencies in 2008; subsequent endorsement by state sector Chief Executives (Forbes, 2008) and consultation undertaken by the School of Government at Victoria University (Forbes, 2011). As Forbes (2008) stated, Statistics New Zealand is not an education provider so the measures taken to address the statistical gaps of key users rely heavily on informal or formal partnerships with education providers.…”