What can we learn from large-scale national and international assessments? NCTM President Matt Larson will discuss in more detail his January President’s Message. Join us  as he provides a combined analysis of the results from the National Assessment for Educational Progress (NAEP) scores, the Trends in Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), and the 2015 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), and recommends actions that we can take together.

Register here for free at NCTM

Message from NZAMT received from NZQA 13th October regarding the 2016 External Examinations for AS1.3, 1.6 and 1.12:

We have had notification from NZQA that they believe schools will find the Level 1 examination papers for November consistent with their expectations and recent previous assessment of the identified standards.  Hence schools can confidently use recent past NZQA examinations  (since the 2011 realignment of L1 standards) in preparing their students for the external examinations.

Posted by Derek Smith

Learn more and sign up.

A webinar for you or your students, brought to you by the American Statistical Association.

Statisticians and data scientists are employed by all types of organizations, including professional sports teams. Join the AMA sports analytics webinar to learn what sports statisticians do and what education is required to become the “Bill James” of your favorite sport.

View the webinar details here. Remember to set your alarm!

Want to get a handle on BIG data? A course for scholarship students?

The Queensland University of Technology is offering a free online PD course. Get a practical insight into big data – and popular tools for collecting, analysing and visualising it.

Find out more

Kia ora Statistics teachers.

We hope you are enjoying teaching students to discover stories in data, and to practice their statistical literacy skills.

Skills in statistics will be invaluable now and in the future, check out The beauty of data visualization then see New Zealand clearly.

Term 2 Updates:

• NZQA Assessment specifications for Externals
• Free online professional development courses: Teaching Statistics Through Data Investigations & Statistics in Medicine
• The Stats for Stats: Student data for all standards by Robyn Headifen
• TED resource:  Why statistics are the key to fighting crime & The rise of human-computer cooperation
• Your life by the numbers video. (1.5 hours)

Nga Mihi

The CensusAtSchool team

See how your students could soon be using statistics and models to predict the future.

There are examples of statistical careers and what statisticians have done to help solve problems with data.

The future of prediction

Some ideas to help students reach their statistics and statistical literacy learning goals:

Primary and Intermediate:

• Futureintech: Bring the real world  into your classroom: Learning from people in industry to highlight when, where and why we need to learn this!
• TinkerPlots: Technology for graphing and interpreting data. Have you checked out the lesson plans?
• Using literature to teach statistics  A lesson plan.
• Exposing young children to activities that develop emergent inferential practices in statistics. (McPhee & Makar, 2014) Professional Reading for numeracy teachers.

Secondary:

• Fathom & iNZight: Technology for secondary statistics teaching.
• Herald article: on careers in statistics.
• A framework for thinking about informal statistical inference. (Makar, K. & Rubin, A., 2009) Professional reading:
• Figure: Lillian Grace was the plenary speaker at both Canterbury and Auckland Statistics Teachers day. The Figure site allows everyone be an explorer and user of data. If you or your students want data to answer a burning question this is the place to contact.
• 2015/16 Census: Have all your classes been involved? Experiencing the census at all levels of the curriculum is important for students to demonstrate that they are “managing variation” and are involved in every aspect of data collection and creation.
• Statistical displays: What about  running a poster competition for Statistics week?!  Below are some examples from oversea’s, how can we improve on these?
• Tour Aotearoa live! Robyn Headifen has suggested following the cycling so much much great data!

What other ideas do you have?

How are you linking with your colleagues in other subjects? How do they approach statistical literacy and use statistics in scientific (both social and the physical sciences) investigations?

Do you have an Investing in Educational Success IES project to share or would like to begin? Also let us know of any cool Stats Apps you’re using with your students.

Finally, a big thanks to teachers who are using the share resources function on CAS.

Nga mihi

The CensusAtSchool Team

We hope you all had a great summer holiday and are looking forward to teaching lots of innovative, well-designed statistics lessons this year.

To help you out we start the year off with a great new data card resource for interactive and effective statistics lessons created by Anna Martin, and some helpful tips on describing Time series trends prepared by the Mathematics and Statistics Facilitators and the NZSA Education Committee.

Returning students may ask you to review their 2015 external exam scripts. Derek Smith has provided links to the level 1, level 2 and level 3 cut scores. Please use this information to inform students if they should proceed with the reconsideration process. Please use your professional judgement with the question totals and overall total (Grade Score marking used) in the November Externals, which is not the same as that used for the assessment of the e-Mcat/MCAT. The assessment conditions for the 2016 externals are also now available on the NZQA website. Level 1, Level 2, Level 3.

As you and your colleagues review and reflect on the 2015 year, we hope CensusAtSchool delivered useful content and information. CensusAtSchool aims to provide the most up to date, statistics teaching resources and information, in the news, by NZSA or other Statistical forums or on the internet. If you want a “heads up” on what to read, watch or do this year the best place to start is right here on CensusAtSchool.

If you ever think that our heads haven’t been up high enough and we seem to have missed something that’s coming soon, please let us know: censusatschoolnz@gmail.com

Please forward this email to any new colleagues who may not receive our weekly emails, these can help keep your colleagues up-to-date with the resources and information on CensusAtSchool.

Nga mihi

Rachel, Chris and Anne