News

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:

• students born in 1997 and younger [approximately Year 7 – 10] and,
• students born in 1994 and younger [approximately Years 11 – 13]

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.

Important dates

• Preparation of posters in schools: Term 4 2012 and Term 1 2013
• Submission of posters to National Coordinator: 29 March 2013
• National Winners Announced: 1 May 2013
• International Winners Announced: ISI 2013 Hong Kong

For further information contact:

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.

Link: http://tinyurl.com/9kuo52f

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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.

Click here to use the data-viewer.

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The following files from the 2011 Statistics Teachers’ Day organised by the Auckland mathematical Association and The University of Auckland’s Department of Statistics have now been put up on Census At School’s website:

http://www.censusatschool.org.nz/2011/statistics-teachers-day-years-12-and-13/

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Use of the iNZight program for analysing statistical data analysis has just been made a whole lot easier. The software is now packaged in a form where it can be downloaded (or copied) and then used on Windows machines without the user needing to have administrative privileges because it needs no formal installation – see the downloads page at:

http://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/~wild/iNZight/

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CensusAtSchool’s survey results have made their way to Indonesia!

“Interestingly, an online educational survey in New Zealand, “CensusAtSchool”, reflected the fact that 83 percent of young respondents expected the All Blacks to make the final of the competition, while only 41 percent thought that they would actually go on to win it.

This contrasts with a UMR Research Ltd. poll that found 77 percent of New Zealand’s adults (parents, presumably, of at least some of the aforementioned children) predicting an All Blacks success story.

The results are surprising. One would have thought that the kids would have been all wide-eyed and dreamy, full of youthful hope and exuberance, while the adults tempered their optimism with the experience of regular disappointment.

Apparently, this is not so, reflecting perhaps the extent to which the “chokers” tag is resonant among the younger generation.”

Source: The Jakarta Post

Random Sampler:
http://censusatschool.org.nz/2011/sampler/

Table Maker:
https://www.censusatschool.org.nz/2011/table-maker/

Questionnaire Preview:
http://censusatschool.org.nz/2011/questions/

Variables List:
http://censusatschool.org.nz/2011/variables/

If you have any questions, please let us know.

CensusAtSchool New Zealand has just been run in May/June 2011. This is the fifth time CensusAtSchool has been held in New Zealand, and it is also run in Australia, Canada, Ireland, Japan, South Africa, UK and USA.

Over 25,000 Year 5-13 students from around the country have taken part to date by completing 31 questions. This is the second biggest participation the project has had to date. More than 1,600 teachers have registered their classes.

There has been significant media coverage of this year’s census – including a story on 3 News, front page story on the NZ Herald which went around the world, radio interviews on Newstalk ZB, Radio Live and Radio New Zealand National.

CensusAtSchool data will be made available to teachers and students via its website shortly and has been referenced in many New Zealand textbooks.