Editors’ Note: Spring

We are thrilled to share with you some exciting news. We are merging the Statistics Teacher Network (STN) and Statistics Education Web journal of online lesson plans (STEW)! The new online publication will be known as Statistics Teacher. There will be two co-editors, formerly the editors of STN and STEW, and a managing editor, the ASA’s K-12 Statistics Education Ambassador Christine Franklin. We thought this new look and publication name would make relevant articles and lesson plans more accessible to our audience, which now consists of a variety of teachers who teach statistics at some level in their classroom. And so we bring you Issue No. 1 of Statistics Teacher!

Our first article is a wonderful piece by Dusty Jones from Sam Houston State University around the classic “birthday problem” often found in probability and statistics. This problem asks how many people would need to be in a room so it is more likely that at least two of them shared a birthday. Dusty presents a way to explore this problem using technology for 6th graders.

Our second article is by Claire Bowen and Evercita Eugenio, graduate students in the department of applied and computational mathematics and statistics at the University of Notre Dame. This article, “Where’s Wenda,” introduces middle-school students to the concept of data privacy using examples involving Reddit, Twitter, and Pinterest. It also shows how to deduce an answer from a large data set.

Our last article, by Mary Richardson and Daniel Adrien at Grand Valley State University, takes a closer look at the popular TV program “The Biggest Loser.” They discuss how students can analyze data from the program by investigating descriptive statistics in a variety of ways around the weight loss among contestants. This information can be used at various grade levels, depending on the knowledge of the students.

There are several STEW lesson plans in this issue, as well. These lessons were specifically chosen to make readers aware of new lessons that have been recently published and those lessons that address common hard-to-teach topics in elementary, middle, and secondary curricula.

We hope you enjoy reading all the articles and lesson plans in this publication. We encourage you to take a look around the new website. We are interested in publishing a wide variety of topics around statistics education within various grade levels. If you are interested in writing for Statistics Teacher, please contact us!

Sincerely,

Angela L.E. Walmsley, Co-Editor,
Concordia University Wisconsin

Hollylynne S. Lee, Co-Editor,
NC State University

Christine Franklin, Managing Editor,
ASA K-12 Statistics Education Ambassador