Dr Patricia O’Hara, Chairperson of the National Statistics Board in Ireland formally launches their new CensusAtSchool Ireland questionnaire today.
There’s a few new questions in it, along with ones in common with our one here in New Zealand. View their questionnaire »
CensusAtSchool is mentioned in the current edition of the Education Gazette (October 15, 2012) in Secondary Focus article “Making statistics real for learners”. Read the article online »
The US Bureau of Labour has released this optimistic statement on job prospects for statisticians:
Employment of statisticians is projected to grow 14 percent from 2010 to 2020, about as fast as the average for all occupations. Growth will result from more widespread use of statistical analysis to make informed decisions. In addition, the large increase in available data from the Internet will open up new areas for analysis.
Government agencies will employ more statisticians to improve the quality of the data available for policy analysis. This occupation will also see growth in research and development in the physical, engineering, and life sciences, where statisticians’ skills in designing tests and assessing results prove highly useful.
Statisticians will continue to be needed in the pharmaceutical industry. As pharmaceutical companies develop new treatments and medical technologies, biostatisticians will be needed to do research and conduct clinical trials. Research and testing are necessary to help companies obtain approval for their products from the Food and Drug Administration.
A large amount of data is generated from Internet searching. Businesses will need statisticians to organize, analyze, and sort through the data for commercial reasons.
Do you want to know more about teaching Year 13 Statistics? Then take note of the following.
To assist NZ teachers in learning about the Year 13 Statistics Curriculum and Standards we have organised a programme of professional development to be delivered in association with the AMA, CMA, OMA, and WMA. To find out about how to register for these days please email the contact person or go to the Association website.
Thursday 22 November, Tamaki Campus
AMA Contact: Ross Parsonage (r.parsonage@auckland.ac.nz )
Tuesday 27 November, University of Canterbury Maths/Stats Dept
CMA Contact: Kristian Giles (gilesk@staff.cbhs.school.nz )
Wednesday 28 November, Otago University
OMA Contact: Munro Doran (munro.doran@obhs.school.nz )
Saturday 1 December, Wellington Girls’ College – Pipitea Block Level 1
WMA Contact: Nada Andic (nada.andic@qmc.school.nz )
Plenary Talk – Changing Needs in a Changing World by Chris Wild and Maxine Pfannkuch, Auckland University
Workshops offered:
The Road Tour has been made possible through support from the following:
The Teaching and Learning Research Initiative (www.tlri.org.nz); Department of Statistics, Auckland University; CensusAtSchool; the Principals of Lynfield College, Cashmere High School, Westlake Girls High School, and Avondale College; NZ Royal Society Endeavour Teacher Fellowship Scheme; and Team Solutions.
Your students are invited to enter the ISLP Statistics Poster Competition for 2012-2013.
The theme for the 2012 – 2013 competition is Agriculture.
Entry is free. Posters are to be prepared in teams of two or three students for an investigation into an issue of interest using the statistical enquiry cycle on any topic within the general theme “Agriculture” (for example, agriculture and domesticated animals/food/industry/urban development etc.).
Data used can be collected by students or be previously published by someone else. If the data is published, the source must be cited in the poster. Posters must be the original design and creation of students. The poster must be on one single sheet, one-sided with maximum size A1. Maximum file size is 2 MB.
Posters must not contain any information about students or schools that prepared them. All entries become the property of the International Statistical Institute (ISI) and cannot be returned. By submitting a poster, students give permission for their work to be displayed at various ISI conferences, special events, in publications and promotional material, and in electronic format on the Internet.
There is further support material available on the International Statistical Literacy Project website, including guidelines for making a statistical poster, judging criteria and links to the ISLP registration form and on Facebook
The competition is divided into two age categories:
Prizes for National Winners will be awarded to the best posters in each age category.
1st Prize in each age category is $500
We thank our sponsors – AGResearch, New Zealand Statistical Association, NZAMT, University of Waikato and University of Auckland – Department of Statistics – for their support.
National Coordinator Dr Sashi Sharma,
Faculty of Education
University of Waikato
Private Bag 3105
Hamilton 3240
Teachers have been telling us that it is very hard to navigate in the landscape of new curriculum materials, achievement standards, exemplars, teaching resources and so on. Because everything is so scattered, it Is often almost impossible to find what you need.
To overcome this Tracey Meek and Lindsay Smith have put together a CensusAtSchool resource which starts with each achievement standard and then links to all relevant resources that we know about. We provide a summary of resources for each Achievement Standard providing links to NZQA, exemplars, TKI, PowerPoint presentations, teaching resources and background articles.
You can now save or copy+paste data-viewer graphics into documents
We have changed the format of the graphics files produced by data-viewer to png.
While they do not look as crisp as the previous swf graphics the big advantage is that they can now be saved or copied and pasted into another document.
PS Please let us know how you’re using CensusAtSchool’s data-viewer with your classes!
Welcome back – we hope you had a lovely break!
Planning is now underway for CensusAtSchool 2013. We would love to know your ideas for questions we should include in next year’s questionnaire. You may wish to ask your students for their suggestions too.
Please email all your suggestions to censusatschoolnz@gmail.com by the end of this week.
As a reminder, here’s the current questions:
http://www.censusatschool.org.nz/2011/questions/
If you also would like any question to be removed from that set, please let us know too.
Thank you!
Rachel Cunliffe
The 2011 database is now in the data-viewer (thoroughly cleaned)
It’s also the data-viewer‘s default database. A lot of effort has gone into cleaning the 2011 data – combatting a trend whereby an annoying but growing minority of students is entering silly values. In preparation for the 2013 survey, we will have a dialogue with teachers later in the year about how this trend might be reversed. The 2011 database is currently the cleanest of the databases.
