Last month at ICOTS in Brisbane, Emeritus Professor Chris Wild was honoured with a Lifetime Advocacy Award. Join us in celebrating this wonderful recognition for his remarkable career that transformed how the world teaches and learns statistics. Chris has also been an integral part of CensusAtSchool since the beginning.
This lifetime advocacy award goes to a person who has changed the experience of statistics education for both teachers and their students across the Pacific and beyond. Chris Wild followed through on George Cobb’s vision of an entirely new way of learning about statistical concepts through data exploration. He did this in two ways: he created technology for teaching and learning about uncertainty in data, and then he rewrote curricula and modelled best practice in teaching simulation-based ideas about chance and data. Nowadays, every student can access and learn from data while learning statistical concepts that underpin the understanding of chance and data. In Aotearoa, we see ourselves as cutting-edge in statistics education; this is largely Chris Wild’s legacy to us, as well as breaking down barriers to learning statistics and making sure that data really is for everyone.
In 1999, with his PhD student and partner in crime, Maxine Pfannkuch, Chris co-authored a seminal paper on empirical inquiry that laid out how statistical thinking and reasoning differ from mathematical reasoning and how this difference affects the broader process of scientific inference. But Chris wasn’t content with researching how statisticians work and reason; he wanted to change classroom practice and rescue students from context-free mathematical formulas. So he did what all great statisticians do: he created tools for others to explore and work with their own data. He created iNZight, a free, open-source platform that allows students and their teachers to create plots of multivariate data instantly. Most of you will remember spending hours laboriously drawing graphs by hand. Now, students can watch dot and box plots appear with a simple click; they can see how data behaves and feel variation without drowning in squared paper, rulers, and equations. We have come a long way.
Chris also built Visual Inference Tools, allowing students to literally see the theory of confidence intervals and hypothesis tests unfolding. He was involved in the team that gave us Pachinkogram for conditional probability and Scampy for conceptual reasoning. You may not be aware that the ‘C’ in Scampy stands for Chris. Why not sneak your name into a statistics tool? Chris’s tools have helped so many students and mathematics teachers learn statistical concepts.
Chris was there at the beginning of the International CensusAtSchool project, and he got hundreds of thousands of kids around the Pacific arguing over high-stakes statistical questions, such as: ‘Does pineapple really belong on pizza?’ CensusAtSchool has been running for over twenty years and is a powerful platform that connects educators across educational divides, from primary to tertiary education. It serves as a one-stop shop for teaching and learning statistics.
At the turn of the millennium, Chris realised that reaching teachers and access to technology were barriers to young people working and exploring data in their classrooms. So, Chris and Maxine organised a classic Kiwi road trip, taking iNZight and a new world-leading curriculum to small towns across Aotearoa. Suddenly, statistics moved from being taught after the exam to being the first topic taught in classrooms around the Pacific. Teachers and their students could see it was a living, human process, and they found themselves noticing and wondering about things they couldn’t before Chris’s technology supported them to do so.
Chris has led global stats education through IASE, the ISI, and ISLP, always championing what he calls ‘computational skills by stealth.’ His YouTube channel, WildAboutStatistics, has clocked over 1.5 million views. Today, in between grandfather duties, he’s tackling Generative AI, warning us to ‘walk backwards into the future’ so we don’t lose our core reasoning.
Over his teaching career, Chris Wild didn’t just model best practice in statistical thinking and reasoning; he helped democratise data science. He helped realise what George Cobb dreamed about and shifted the global paradigm in statistics education from mathematical gatekeeping to visual intuition. Please join us in celebrating Emeritus Professor Chris Wild, who proved that we should all be just a bit “Wild” about statistics!
