Plenaries

Plenary 1: STATISTICAL EDUCATION FOR DOING STATISTICS PROFESSIONALLY: SOME CHALLENGES AND THE ROAD AHEAD

Pedro L do Nascimento Silva
ENCE/IBGE, Brazil

Statistical education for doing Statistics professionally requires us to consider a number of questions: first, who will be doing Statistics professionally? Second, how do we approach each type of public and get them to learn what is important about doing Statistics professionally. Third, how do we strengthen Statistics by enlarging the good practice? These are some of the questions and challenges facing Statistical education, which we have to address. At the same time, major opportunities for development are opening up: a large and growing set of statistical tools is available; fields of application are expanding; improved technology is available for statistical education (e.g. via distance learning); abundant data and examples may be used for motivation and practice. Meeting the challenges and exploiting these opportunities will require extensive collaboration between “traditional” Statistics Education and many other fields, from computer science and mathematics, psychology and cognitive research, management science, and scientists and educators broadly. Hence we must ask ourselves whether we are doing enough to meet the challenges and exploit the opportunities that we foresee, paving the road for an even brighter future of Statistics.

Plenary 2: COLLABORATION IN STATISTICS EDUCATION RESEARCH: STORIES, REFLECTIONS, AND LESSONS LEARNED

Joan Garfield
University of Minnesota, United States

In this paper I summarize my 25 years of research on teaching and learning statistics, as I participated in the emergence of statistics education as a research discipline. This summary and reflection are presented through stories of research projects I have been involved in, all of which involved collaborations with colleagues who have made important contributions to the research and from whom I have learned many important lessons. I summarize and reflect on three interconnected areas of research: synthesizing and building on research studies across diverse disciplines, developing and using good assessment instruments to evaluate and improve student learning, and studying the role of technological tools in developing students’ reasoning about specific concepts.

Plenary 3: PANEL DISCUSSION: THE CHALLENGES FOR COOPERATION IN STATISTICS EDUCATION

Pedro A Morettin ~ Brazil (Chair)
Evelio Osvaldo Fabbroni ~ Panama
Jae Chang Lee ~ Republic of Korea
Denise Lievesley ~ United Kingdom
Pilar Martin-Guzman ~ Spain
Allan Rossman ~ United States

This panel will bring five participants who will duscuss the several ways of possible cooperation for the Statistics education. Evelio Fabbroni will bring his experience as member of several statistical organizations to talk about the personnel education and training for the National Statistical Offices. Allan Rossman will address the difficulties in seeking cooperation between statisticians, statistics teachers and statistics researchers, having different backgrounds and experiences. Jae C. Lee will addres his experiences in Korea. Pilar Guzman will talk about the difficulties in teaching statistics within the official environment and how cooperation between academics and official statisticians could help. Finally, Pedro Morettin will discuss some aspects of cooperation in the training of statisticians at undergraduate level.

Plenary 4: COOPERATION AND CONFLICT IN ENVIRONMENTAL STATISTICS

Bryan F.J. Manly
University of Sao Paulo, Brazil
Western EcoSystems Technology, United States

Statistics often plays a major role when an environmental problem is being discussed. Typically, managers would like to take actions that are expected to reduce the problem, but the available data are not sufficient to show clearly what those actions should be. In addition, there are various interested parties that have good reasons for favouring particular management actions, or no actions at all. It helps if a statistician is involved in situations like this, providing that they are open minded about the conclusions that can be drawn from the data. The input that they can provide includes suggestions for improved methods for sampling and analysis, and acting as a referee when it comes to assessing alternative conclusions from the available data. In this talk I will discuss the role of a statistical consultant working in the environmental area, based on my experiences over the last 20 years.

Plenary 5: TRAINING STATISTICIANS FOR WORKING IN PUBLIC AFFAIRS

Len Cook
International Statistical Institute, New Zealand

Statistics play a critical part in public affairs, for example through official statistics, evaluating scientific research, validating evidence in courts, weather forecasting and audit selection. The immediacy of the internet, the all pervasiveness of the news media, and an increasing capacity for measurement have brought a dramatic shift in the capacity to record, access transfer and challenge information and experiences. This can often place the statistician in the hot seat. Are statisticians being equipped for managing the public or political consequences when they judge the limits to measurability? Has the increased specialisation of statistical work diminished the flexibility of practising statisticians? This presentation considers these and other questions, to provide some basis for finding ways to better develop statisticians for these developing challenges, and so retain both our relevance and the trust of the public. Many of these concerns make the task of official statisticians more difficult, but there is much to gain from sharing the experiences that are also faced by other groups of statisticians.

Plenary 6: STUDENTS’ WORK AND STUDENT THINKING: AN INVALUABLE SOURCE FOR TEACHING AND RESEARCH

J. Michael Shaughnessy
Portland State University, United States

In recent years there has been increased attention within both the research and teaching communities of mathematics education to using student work and student thinking to obtain clues about how students develop and construct their mathematical knowledge. Teachers and researchers in statistics education have also begun to look more closely at student work and student thinking on statistics tasks, in order to gain better insights into what their students know about statistical concepts. In this plenary talk I will share some excerpts of Grade 6 - 12 students’ thinking and reasoning on several statistical tasks that were designed to probe for students’ understandings of variability in data sets and in distributions. Task based interviews on data sets presented to our students in both graphical and tabular form that can provide us with roadmaps to for curriculum decisions to enrich our students' statistical growth whatever their level may be.

Plenary 7: ON COOPERATION AND COMPETITION

Chris Wild
University of Auckland, New Zealand

We explore the tensions between cooperation and competition in the context of improving the content, delivery and penetration of statistics education. We explore models for increasing the numbers of students studying statistics and how working in teams can increase the quality of the teaching that students experience.