News

Tonight is the last in this years Ihaka Lecture series. If you missed any you can watch them at: Link: https://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/ihaka-lectures

Speaker:     Alberto Cairo
Affiliation: University of Miami
Title:       Visual trumpery: How charts lie
Date:        Wednesday, 21 March 2018
Time:        6:30 pm to 7:30 pm
Location:    6.30pm, Large Chemistry Lecture Theatre, Ground Floor, Building 301, 23 Symonds Street, City Campus, Auckland Central.

In our final 2018 Ihaka lecture, Alberto Cairo (Knight Chair in Visual
Journalism at the University of Miami) will deliver the following:
Visual trumpery: How charts lie — and how they make us smarter

Please join us for refreshments from 6pm in the foyer area outside the
lecture theatre.

With facts and truth increasingly under assault, many interest groups have
enlisted charts — graphs, maps, diagrams, etc. — to support all manner of
spin. Because digital images are inherently shareable and can quickly
amplify messages, sifting through the visual information and misinformation
is an important skill for any citizen.

The use of graphs, charts, maps and infographics to explore data and
communicate science to the public has become more and more popular.
However, this rise in popularity has not been accompanied by an increasing
awareness of the rules that should guide the design of these
visualisations. This talk teaches normal citizens principles to become a more critical and
better informed readers of charts.

Biography:
Alberto Cairo is the Knight Chair in Visual Journalism at the University of
Miami. He’s also the director of the visualisation programme at UM’s Center
for Computational Science. Cairo has been a director of infographics and
multimedia at news publications in Spain (El Mundo, 2000-2005) and Brazil
(Editora Globo, 2010-2012,) and a professor at the University of North
Carolina-Chapel Hill. Besides teaching at UM, he works as a freelancer and
consultant for companies such as Google and Microsoft. He’s the author of
the books The Functional Art: An Introduction to Information Graphics and
Visualization (2012) and The Truthful Art: Data, Charts, and Maps for
Communication (2016).

Map: https://goo.gl/maps/fNuHvmNWPru ]

https://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/ihaka-lectures

Thanks to Vicki Haverkort, HOD Mathematics at Huanui College for sending these photos of Year 7 students entering their CensusAtSchool data and how they used the data to model the PPDAC cycle.

Students stood in a circle to visually see how large Tane Mahuta’s girth is at the end of the lesson.

Stats NZ have analysed the data. View the newsletter from Stats NZ, a great resource to share with your colleagues.

Features: NZ climate change (excellent short video) and internet usage.

Sign up to receive new information releases.

The Friday Institute have opened registration for MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) Fall 2017.

Two of these will be of interest to teachers of Statistics, or pair up with another subject area to look for overlaps!

Teaching statistics through data investigations

Teaching statistics through inferential reasoning

Joel measuring his armspan

Liv’s height being measured

Nathaniel, Cristo and Sean attempting to stand on one leg with their eyes closed

to census

Thanks to Micheline Evans of Clyde Quay School in Wellington for sharing these photos of students taking part in CensusAtSchool.

Thanks to Heather McIntyre of Te Karaka Area School for sending these photos of students taking part in CensusAtSchool.

Anna-Marie Fergusson (The University of Auckland) presented a workshop and webinar on Statistical Reasoning with Data Cards.

“Using data cards in the teaching of statistics can be a powerful way to build students’ statistical reasoning. Important understandings related to working with multivariate data, posing statistical questions, recognizing sampling variation and thinking about models can be developed. The use of real-life data cards involves hands-on and visual-based activities.”

Anna’s work using physical data cards and digital technology supports pedagogy required to effectively teach statistical reasoning. This talk presented material from the Meeting Within a Meeting (MWM) Statistics Workshop for Mathematics and Science teachers held at JSM Chicago (2016) which can be used in classrooms to support teaching statistical thinking and reasoning, key teaching and learning ideas that underpin the activities were also discussed.

Download the webinar accompanying files

Please share this excellent resource widely with your teaching colleagues and post any feedback you have about the resources or webinar.

Thanks to Michelle Dalrymple of Cashmere High School for sharing these photos of her Year 9 class taking part in CensusAtSchool.

Our press release with insights into our students’ school lunches received a range of media coverage, including:

• Survey shows the number of students using school tuck shops has halved, Newstalk ZB interview with Rachel Cunliffe (May 2, 2017)
• Tuck shops losing out to packed lunches, NZ Herald, Online (May 2, 2017)
• Tuck shops losing out to home packed lunches, NZ Doctor (May 2, 2017)
• South Canterbury schools take part in nationwide survey measuring where they get their lunch from, Stuff (May 3, 2017)

Press release: May 2, 2017

School tuck shops are losing ground to home-packed lunches, according to latest results from the long-running CensusatSchool TataurangaKiteKura. In the past 10 years, the percentage of students buying lunches from tuck shops has halved.

Overall, 86% of primary and secondary school students brought their lunch from home on the day they responded to the survey, with just 5% buying from the tuck shop. When the same question was asked a decade ago, 79% were bringing lunch from home and 10% buying at their school’s tuck shop.

CensusAtSchool TataurangaKiTeKura is a national, biennial project run by the University of Auckland’s Department of Statistics that shows children the relevance of statistics to everyday life. In class, Year 5 to Year 13 students (aged 9 to 18) use digital devices to answer 35 online questions in English or te reo Māori, providing a unique snapshot of Kiwi childhoods. So far, more than 10,000 students have taken part, and they have answered several questions on food.

The Census asked “Where did you get your lunch from today?” with the possible answers “home” (overall 86%; primary 93%; high school 78%); “a shop on the way to school” (overall 3%; primary 2%; high school 3%); “the school shop” (overall 5%; primary 3%; high school 7%); “a friend at school” (overall 0.5%; primary 0.2%; high school 1%); “provided by my school” (overall 2%; primary 1%; high school 4%); and “don’t have any” (overall 3.6%; primary 1%; high school 7%).

The backdrop is growing childhood obesity and much public debate over what kids should be eating at school. An Education Review Office report released just before Easter found that most schools were doing a good job equipping young people to make good food choices, but acknowledged that factors such as family finances and attitudes, student price sensitivity and takeaway shops near schools could prevent children bringing or choosing good-quality lunches. Many school-run tuck shops lost money, so schools often contracted out to providers who “were profit-driven, and tended to be most interested in stocking what would sell well; not usually the healthy options”.

CensusAtSchool co-director Rachel Cunliffe, who has two school-aged children, says that she wonders if public discussions have raised parents’ awareness of the importance of the school lunches they provide, and that this has led to more concerted efforts to provide packed lunches. Mrs Cunliffe makes her two primary school-aged children daily packed lunches, and once a term they are allowed to buy lunch at school: “Of course, they tell me that everyone else gets to buy their lunches all the time.”

The past few years has also brought publicity about some school children going without breakfast or lunch, and Mrs Cunliffe says she was “relieved” that the number of children reporting that they had no lunch was fewer than expected. “That said, you don’t want to think that any students are going hungry,” she says. “I am hoping that the 7% of high-school students not having any lunch is because they didn’t get their act together to prepare it. A packed lunch does take some forethought and preparation.”

The Census also asked children who brought packed lunches how many items grown at home were among the food provided that day. A quarter said they had at least one home-grown item in their lunchbox.

This year’s edition of CensusAtSchool TataurangaKiteKura started on February 7. Teachers can register their classes and take part at any time before it finishes on July 7. The Census is part of an international effort to boost statistical capability among young people, and is carried out in Australia, the United Kingdom, Canada, the United States, Japan and South Africa.

The countries share some questions so comparisons can be made. In New Zealand, the Census started 2003, and is run by the University of Auckland’s Department of Statistics with support from Statistics NZ and the Ministry of Education.