The Art of Stats – Sir David Spiegelhalter
One of the world’s greatest statisticians Sir David Spiegelhalter was interviewed by Radio New Zealand. He discussed his book The Art of Statistics and how to distinguish truth from myth. The entire interview is worth listening to help improve statistical literacy, perfect for students studying Scholarship or Evaluating Statistically based reports (2.11, 3.12). Alternatively, ask your librarian to get it in you school library in the Stats section. Sir David’s website Understanding Uncertainty has many animations, videos and podcasts. Plus maths will also be useful for Scholarship students.
Sir David acknowledged New Zealand’s progressive Statistics education:
“New Zealand is the world leader for statistics education. In my book, I give full credit for stealing from New Zealand’s way of teaching statistics in schools. It’s quite extraordinary the progress that’s made. I tell you, you may not know from inside in New Zealand, but New Zealand has a fantastic reputation in statistics, both in education and computing. It is an amazing achievement.And so I am full of praise and try to emulate many of the ways in which statistics education has been developed in New Zealand, which we are trying to get into much more [for] the UK system – based on real practical problems, problem-solving all the time; not just theoretical and abstract ideas. Here is an important issue; how can we use data to deal with it. And that down-to-earth approach is extraordinarily powerful…”
We know improvements are needed in what we do here, but the view of statistics education in New Zealand from the rest of the world is pretty good!
Check out these data sets from the website ArtofStat by Berhard Klinberger that could be interesting to start digging into data.
