Announcements: Winter
Christine Franklin Begins Role as ASA K–12 Statistical Ambassador
Christine Franklin (the lead author of the GAISE Pre-K–12 Report and the new SET Report, has started her role as the inaugural ASA K–12 Statistical Ambassador. Chris will provide leadership in the creation and presentation of professional development materials for teacher educators and teachers. She will present at national conferences, conduct workshops, collaborate with ASA chapters to enhance their education initiatives, and assist in outreach to the STEM education community. For more information, please see Amstat News or contact Chris Franklin.
ASA 2016 Poster and Project Winners Announced
The ASA is pleased to announce the winners of the 2016 poster and project competitions. The competitions offer opportunities for students to formulate questions and collect, analyze, and draw conclusions from data. Winners were recognized with plaques, cash prizes, certificates, and calculators. Also, their names were published in Amstat News. View the winning posters and projects.
2017 Poster and Project Competitions
Introduce your K–12 students to statistics through the annual poster and project competitions directed by the ASA/NCTM Joint Committee on Curriculum in Statistics and Probability. The competitions offer opportunities for students to formulate questions and collect, analyze, and draw conclusions from data. Winners will be recognized with plaques, cash prizes, certificates, and calculators. Also, their names will be published in Amstat News. Posters (grades K–12) are due every year on April 1. Projects (grades 7–12) are due June 1.
Statistics Education Web (STEW) Lesson Plans
If you have not been to the redesigned STEW website to see the collection of lesson plans, check it out! We are currently seeking new lesson plans, especially for grades K–5 and 6–8. See the site for details.
Statistics in Schools Program of U.S. Census Bureau
Statistics in Schools is a free program from the U.S. Census Bureau offering data, tools, and activities that correspond with relevant education standards and guidelines. The activities use real-life census information for teachers to incorporate into their lesson plans. Through this program, students can connect the world around them to what they are learning in the classroom. Use of Statistics in Schools in lesson plans helps students gain important skills, such as understanding statistics and analyzing data, in a variety of subjects—including history, geography, sociology, and math—at multiple grade levels.
Free ASA Webinar on Reproducible Research on November 16
The ASA is sponsoring a free webinar, titled “Teaching Reproducible Research: Inspiring New Researchers to Do More Robust and Reliable Science.” It will feature Karl Broman (University of Wisconsin) and Mine Çetinkaya-Rundel (Duke University) and be moderated by Benjamin Baumer (Smith College). The webinar is Wednesday, November 16, 2016, 2:30–3:30 p.m. EST. There is no fee to attend, but you must register.
Free Statistics Education Webinars
The ASA offers free webinars on K–12 statistics education topics. Newly posted webinars include Teaching Simulation-Based Inference by Kari Lock Morgan and Smelling Parkinson’s Disease and Other Simulation-Based Inference Activities by Doug Tyson. This series was developed as part of the follow-up activities for the Meeting Within a Meeting Statistics Workshop. The Consortium for the Advancement of Undergraduate Statistics Education also offers free webinars on undergraduate statistics education topics. The ASA/American Mathematical Association of Two-Year Colleges (AMATYC) Joint Committee offers free statistics webinars through AMATYC, as well.
Free ASA Sports Statistics Webinar
The ASA and its public education campaign, ThisIsStatistics, conducted a sports statistics webinar featuring Dennis Lock, director of analytics with the Miami Dolphins; Stephanie Kovalchik, senior sport scientist with Tennis Australia; and Scott Evans, senior research scientist at Harvard University and member of the New England Symposium on Statistics in Sports. For more information about careers in sports statistics, access a recording of the ASA’s sports statistics webinar.
Statistical Education of Teachers (SET) Report
The American Statistical Association (ASA) has issued the Statistical Education of Teachers (SET) Report, which calls on mathematicians, statisticians, mathematics educators, and statistics educators to collaborate in preparing pre-K–12 teachers to teach intellectually demanding statistics courses in their classrooms. SET was commissioned to clarify the recommendations for teacher statistical preparation in the Conference Board of the Mathematical Sciences’ Mathematical Education of Teachers II report. The SET report uses the ASA Pre-K–12 GAISE Framework as the structure for outlining the content and conceptual understanding teachers need to know in assisting their students develop statistical reasoning skills. The report facilitates the understanding of key topics such as what sets statistics apart as a discipline, the difference between statistical and mathematical reasoning, and the role of probability in statistical reasoning. SET is intended for everyone involved in the statistical education of teachers, both the initial preparation of prospective teachers and the professional development of practicing teachers.
GAISE 2016 College Report
The ASA board of directors endorsed the 2016 Guidelines for Assessment and Instruction in Statistics Education (GAISE) College Report, which provides updates to the recommendations for teaching introductory statistics.
ASA Stats 101 Toolkit
Many teachers of introductory statistics courses, whether at the high-school or two-year or four-year college or university level are trained in mathematics and may not have training or experience with statistics. At the request of the 2015 president of the American Statistical Association, David Morganstein, a group of statistical educators led by Dick De Veaux wrote the Stats 101 series of case studies, designed to show statistics in action, rather than a branch of mathematics. Each case starts with a real-world problem and leads the reader through the steps taken to explore the problem, highlighting the techniques used in introductory or AP Statistics classes. Sometimes the analysis goes slightly past the methods taught in such an intro course, but the analysis is meant to build on simpler techniques and provide examples of real analyses, typical of the kind a professional statistician might perform. Our hope is that these case studies can both provide context and motivation for the instructor so the methods in the intro course come alive, rather than seem a list of cookbook formulas. They can be used as examples in class, or just as guides for what a statistical analysis might entail.
Episode 21 of STATS+STORIES Available
Episode 21 of Stats+Stories, a “Winning Formula for Sports,” is now available. Dennis Lock (@LockAnalytics) currently serves as director of analytics for the Miami Dolphins NFL team. In his role, he supports football operations through research and statistical analyses. He has been a consultant for the Iowa State University men’s basketball team and is a co-author of a popular statistics textbook. He joined the Stats+Stories regulars to discuss the importance and influence of statistical insights for sports. To listen now, please visit the website or find it on iTunes.
Significance Opens Archives
Significance magazine has opened its 10-year archives for access to the public. The magazine’s volumes 1 through 10 are available to read, free of charge. Further, all magazine content will be made available at no cost one year after its initial publication. Editor Brian Tarran believes open access will demonstrate the importance of statistics and the contributions it makes to all areas of life. Royal Statistical Society and ASA members and subscribers will continue to enjoy exclusive access to the latest magazine content.
Data-Driven Mathematics Modules Available Free Online
Data-Driven Mathematics is a series of modules funded by the National Science Foundation and written by statisticians and mathematics teachers. Intended to complement a modern mathematics curriculum in the secondary schools, the modules offer materials that integrate data analysis with topics typically taught in high-school mathematics courses and provide realistic, real-world data situations for developing mathematical knowledge. Scanned copies of these books are freely available to download.
Stats.org Resources
Stats.org is a collaboration between the ASA and Sense About Science USA that aims to provide guidance regarding statistical literacy to journalists and the public. It provides interesting examples and stories that can be used in the classroom.
Census at School Program Reaches More Than 50,000 Students
The ASA’s U.S. Census at School program is a free, international classroom project that engages students in grades 4–12 in statistical problem solving. The students complete an online survey, analyze their class census results, and compare their class with random samples of students in the United States and other participating countries. The project began in the United Kingdom in 2000 and now includes Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, Ireland, South Korea, and Japan. The ASA is seeking champions to further expand the U.S. Census at School program nationally. For more information about how you can get involved, see this article or email Rebecca Nichols.
Explore Census at School Data with TuvaLabs
TuvaLabs provides free, real data sets, lessons, and visualization tools to enable teachers to teach statistics and quantitative reasoning in the context of real-world issues and topics. The ASA has provided TuvaLabs with a clean Census at School data set with 500 cases and 20 attributes. It is freely available in TuvaLabs for students and teachers to explore online with their visualization tool and Census at School–adapted lesson plans. Start exploring Census at School data with TuvaLabs or other TuvaLabs data sets and lessons.
Online Community for ASA K–12 Teacher Members
An online community for ASA K–12 Teacher Members will allow participation in online discussions and the sharing of resources with other members. Not yet an ASA K–12 Teacher Member? Start your free one-year trial.
World of Statistics Website and Resources
The free international statistics education resources created during the 2013 International Year of Statistics are available and ongoing through the new World of Statistics website. Teachers everywhere can access a wealth of statistics instruction tools and resources from around the world.
PROJECT-SET
Project-SET is an NSF-funded project to develop curricular materials that enhance the ability of high-school teachers to foster students’ statistical learning regarding sampling variability and regression. All materials are geared toward helping high-school teachers implement the Common Core State Standards for statistics and are closely aligned with the learning goals outlined in Guidelines for Assessment and Instruction in Statistics Education (GAISE): A Pre-K–12 Curriculum Framework.
LOCUS Assessment Resources
LOCUS is an NSF-funded project focused on developing assessments of statistical understanding across levels of development as identified in the Guidelines for Assessment and Instruction in Statistics Education (GAISE). The intent of these assessments is to provide teachers, educational leaders, assessment specialists, and researchers with a valid and reliable assessment of conceptual understanding in statistics consistent with the Common Core State Standards. The LOCUS website offers online assessment tools to measure statistical understanding. Create an account and manage test requests to receive immediate results from these automatically scored assessments. This is a great way for students to practice taking assessments online. Additional professional development resources are available with questions accompanied by high-quality commentaries written alongside student samples.
YouTube Videos on Descriptive Statistical Concepts
Need assistance in teaching your students statistical thinking? Through funding from Duke University and the American Statistical Association, Dalene Stangl, Kate Allman, Mine Cetinkaya-Rundel, and a group of Duke students have created a set of 52 videos to help you understand and teach basic descriptive statistical concepts. The videos are organized into five units. Within each unit, there are videos covering core concepts, pedagogy, JMP software, and applet demonstrations. Unit one covers data and explains the structure of the videos. Unit two covers one-variable descriptive statistics, transforming a variable, and the normal curve. Unit three covers description of relationships between two categorical variables (contingency tables) and between one categorical and one numeric (side-by-side boxplots). Unit four covers description of relationship between two numeric variables using correlation and regression. Unit five pulls all the concepts together in review videos. We hope you find them useful. Enjoy!
Videos from Data to Insight Accessible Free on YouTube
Chris Wild’s Data to Insight: An Introduction to Data Analysis is a free, online, hands-on introduction to statistical data analysis. The videos, which make up most of its teaching content, have been made accessible on YouTube. While Data to Insight prototypes a next-generation introductory statistics course, many of its videos are immediately useful for current high-school and lower-level university statistics courses. The videos are indexed together with an outline of their content and the course design philosophy (see also the YouTube channel Wild About Statistics). For those actually wanting to learn about statistics, materials is only one part of the story. As we know, what learners do (activities) is more important than what they simply see. The course starts formally on October 3 and runs for eight weeks; however, it is self-paced and can be joined at any time until mid-December.
Against All Odds: Inside Statistics
Against All Odds is a free video series teaching introductory statistics concepts in context of real-life applications. This is an updated video series developed by Annenberg Learner (the producers of the original version in the 1980s) and contains videos, a glossary, teacher guides, and student guides.
Mobilize: Engaging Secondary Schools in Data Science
Robert Gould, Lead Principal Investigator
Statistics teachers know that requiring students to collect data is an effective way of engaging them in data analysis. Mobilize is an NSF-funded project that has developed a technology suite allowing students to engage in participatory sensing (PS) campaigns. In a PS campaign, students use their mobile devices to create a community that not only gathers data, but shares both the data and the analysis. The software includes an interactive “dashboard” that allows students to explore multivariate relations among variables that are numerical, categorical, location, data-and-time, text, and image.
The suite is used in a Mobilize-developed curriculum, the year-long course Introduction to Data Science (IDS). IDS is a “C” approved mathematics course in the University of California A-G requirements, which means successful completion of IDS validates Algebra II and provides an alternative admissions pathway to the University of California and California State University systems. To date, IDS has been taught in more than 35 classes and is still expanding.
The Mobilize project is a partnership between UCLA’s Department of Statistics and Graduate School of Education and Information Studies and the Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s second-largest school district. Mobilize is interested in identifying additional schools or districts interested in adopting the IDS course or using the Mobilize technology suite. To learn more, contact LeeAnn Trusela, mobilize project director, or visit the Mobilize website.
Albert Einstein Distinguished Educator Fellowship Program
Albert Einstein Distinguished Educator Fellowship Program is now accepting applications for the 2017–2018 fellowship year. Applications are due November 17, 2016. The AEF program provides a unique opportunity for accomplished K–12 educators in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) to serve in the national education arena. Fellows spend 11 months working in a federal agency or U.S. congressional office, bringing their extensive classroom knowledge and experience to STEM education program and/or education policy efforts. Information about the Albert Einstein Distinguished Educator Fellowship Program—including eligibility requirements, program benefits, application requirements, and access to the online application system—can be found on the fellowship website.
