Editors’ Preface

Allan Rossman and Beth Chance
California Polytechnic State University, United States
arossman@calpoly.edu,   bchance@calpoly.edu

Editing these Proceedings has been a great privilege for us. We have been impressed with the quality and variety of the papers and posters submitted for ICOTS-7. We have also been struck by the dedication, expertise, and professionalism of hundreds of volunteers who have contributed to this enterprise. Indeed, the process of assembling this volume has embodied the conference theme: working cooperatively in statistics education. We have enjoyed working with our fellow members of the International Program Committee, with the conveners and organizers of the conference topics and sessions, with the authors of the papers themselves, and with the referees who reviewed papers. These statistics educators represent more than 60 countries from all parts of the world, and from a variety of academic backgrounds and interests. All have worked together because of a shared commitment to improving the teaching and learning of statistics, both around the world and in each one’s small corner of it. We hope that the roughly 400 papers and poster abstracts contained in these Proceedings will prove helpful toward achieving this goal, not only for those attending the conference but also for statistics teachers and education researchers who are unable to make it to Salvador.

Refereeing process

An optional refereeing process for ICOTS Proceedings was instituted with ICOTS-6, and we have continued and expanded the process with ICOTS-7. The goals of this refereeing are to improve the quality of the papers and to provide recognition to those papers that satisfy the standard of peer review. A total of 139 papers were submitted to this process and reviewed by three or four peers each, of which 78% were designated as having satisfied the peer-review process. These papers are identified as “refereed” in the header of the pdf file.

Acknowledgements

We thank the 141 referees who graciously volunteered their time and expertise to this task. Most of them refereed three papers, and several refereed more than that, often on very short notice. We also thank Brian Phillips, Editor of the Proceedings of ICOTS-6, for sharing helpful advice, and John Shanks, Web Master of ICOTS-7, for devising an automated system to manage the refereeing process and for invaluable support throughout this editing process. We also thank several people who helped with preparing the pdf files of the papers: Emily Anderson, Donna Chance, Frank Chance, Jenna Maskell, Mary Mortlock, and Eileen Rossman.