News

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

This first term newsletter is important reading for all secondary mathematics and statistics teachers.

Upcoming workshops for current PLD are advertised and useful links and tips are provided by Derek Smith and the national facilitation team.

Secondary Mathematics and Statistics Newsletter Term 1 2016

Derek has also sent through some other interesting links that didn’t make it into the newsletter:

Some reminders:

NZAMT14 Conference workshop resources

https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B7g2b0ejmaWkfkozOTc4WjEzWTUzTERXUDVuaHNjdllVTl8tRFUtN2JneEEtRm5aV1RoZFk&usp=sharing

2015 Ernest Duncan Award Winner Ricky Pedersen has offered to make his Critical Thinking Booklet available for download.

http://www.nzamt.org.nz/index.php/nzamt-teaching-awards/ernest-duncan/296-critical-thinking-download  

Interesting bits and pieces

Some research on happiness in schools for your interest. It would be interesting to ask your faculty members, and yourself, “What makes you happy during the school day or during a lesson?”

https://www.ted.com/talks/shawn_achor_the_happy_secret_to_better_work?language=en
Some interesting data sets from a NZ long term study:

http://www.psych.auckland.ac.nz/en/about/our-research/research-groups/new-zealand-attitudes-and-values-study.html

TED Talks links to videos
https://www.ted.com/talks/shawn_achor_the_happy_secret_to_better_work?language=en
https://www.ted.com/talks/julian_treasure_how_to_speak_so_that_people_want_to_listen?language=en

An ERO publication

http://ero.govt.nz/content/download/218083/3728627/version/2/file/ASMS+synthesis+V2.pdf

Learning geometry via Origami

http://www.scholastic.com/teachers/top-teaching/2016/01/teaching-math-modular-origami 

Why is learning fraction arithmetic so difficult? From STEM Learning

A look at the methods of teaching fraction arithmetic in Shanghai  

Learning maths through song and dance

https://www.facebook.com/nbcnightlynews/videos/10153923415943689/?fref=nf 

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Hope that your athletics and Swimming sports day are progessing well while the country enjoys the settled weather we are enjoying.

Our hearts go out to the people in Canterbury as they wrestle with nature.

Näku i roto i ngä mihi, nä

Derek

Derek Smith|Mathematics National Co-ordinator/Central South Facilitator (Secondary)|Education Support Services|

Te Tapuae o Rehua Consortium Mau ki te ako|University of Otago College of Education|021 913 150|

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

Congratulations to Associate Professor Maxine Pfannkuch of the University of Auckland for receiving a lifetime achievement award from the NZSA. Maxine has written many wonderful resources here for CensusAtSchool.

If you studied statistics at secondary school in the last quarter of a century, your learning was influenced by Maxine Pfannkuch of the Department of Statistics. Associate Professor Pfannkuch studies how people, mostly school students, draw statistical conclusions from data and from graphics, and looks for ways to teach them to do it better. Her work has led to many improvements to high-school statistics curricula here and overseas.

And Associate Professor Pfannkuch’s contribution has been recognised with a lifetime achievement award from the 68-year-old New Zealand Statistical Association (NZSA). The Campbell Award commemorates Professor James Towers Campbell (1906-1994), who was the first president of the NZSA. The award requires an “exceptional” publication record, and “prolonged and outstanding” contribution to statistical education as well as involvement in “major, innovative research projects that have direct relevance to New Zealand”.

Read the rest of the article here »

Theme: Making connections

Date: Friday 27^th November

Venue: Tamaki Campus, University of Auckland,

Plenary speaker: Lillian Grace, CEO and founder Figure.NZ

Registrations opened: Tuesday 27 October

Online registrations will close Monday 9 November 5pm.

Workshops will cover levels 4 to 8 of the NZ curriculum incorporating material suitable for years 7 to 13 (and including Scholarship at year 13)

Detailed information on workshops and registration can be found via links at

https://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/en/for/schools/statistics-teachers-day.html

Today is World Statistics Day!

Watch students at Kapiti College show how they use the inquiry cycle to make conclusions from data.

Today organisations, teachers and students from all over the world will be celebrating the role that data plays in our lives now and in the future.

Statistics New Zealand have launched a Level 3 time series resource to showcase how they analyze data, this presentation was well received at NZAMT 2015.

Other World Statistics Day classroom activities include a movie showing students how they can contribute to a data-driven future, and a poster explaining how statistics around the world are use to make decisions. These could be a great way to generate discussion about how we use statistics in the world outside school.

Also Anna Martin has produced a very addictive game to celebrate World Statistics day, what does your data look like?

From January 2016, Statistics New Zealand’s Schools Corner will no longer be available.

From February 2016, relevant resources will be relocated to here CensusAtSchool and the nzmaths website.

Are your students ready for an on-line statistical modeling challenge for maths week!? Expose your students to future careers that will be found at the intersection of data, visual arts and modelling.

Anna Fergusson has created a word difficulty ranking generator, students can gather data to try and model and predict a ‘readability score’. Statistics teachers if you would like to find out more background about the challenge visit Anna’s website.

How will the challenge run?

Monday to Tuesday

Students test their own words through the on-line text analyser, record data from these tests, and try to develop a way to predict the readability score. They should make some notes/diagrams for their model and use these to predict readability scores for the first set of reserved words.

Wednesday to Thursday

Students have access to check the first set of reserved words. They enter the readability score they would predict for each reserved word, and see how this compares to the actual readability score. This should help them refine their prediction model.

Friday

Students have access to check the second set of reserved words. They enter the readability score they would predict for each reserved word, and see how this compares to the actual readability score. They should only do this once (i.e. this should be their final evaluation of the model).

Keen to give it a go?

Here’s the place to send students: http://mathstatic.co.nz/predictive-text-challenge