> The Royal Statistical Society is still registering for this conference and participants who wish to register on the day will be very welcome to do so.
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> Does the current school curriculum help students develop the reasoning skills they need? Given students reason from evidence in a variety of subjects it can be argued that more should be done to integrate these curriculum efforts. How might the statistics curriculum change in order to ensure that future generations have the reasoning skills they need? In this meeting we will explore the extent to which the current curriculum helps students to develop necessary reasoning skills and we will identify ways to do better. Consideration will be given to practical suggestions for action and to the development of an agenda to improve students> '> (and later citizens> '> ) ability to reason from evidence.
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> This conference will be of interest to teachers of Mathematics and Statistics and a number of other disciplines from Geography to the Sciences. Also everybody with a direct interest in important cross-curricular issues of this kind, in particular colleagues involved in related policy making.
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> Conference speakers will be:
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> Professor Jim Ridgway and James Nicholson of the University of Durham who have been working on a project investigating the development of reasoning from evidence in general, and statistical thinking in particular. They will demonstrate interfaces which allow students to work comfortably with multiple variables, also a teaching style which encourages problem exploration and problem posing. Reports of recent research into the relative difficulty of ICT-based multivariate tasks compared with paper-based tasks will provide some academic rigour.
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> Neil Sheldon of the Manchester Grammar School who will cast a critical eye over the role of inference in the statistics curriculum, emphasising that the purpose of statistics is insight and understanding, not numbers or data or graphs.
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> Graham Smart of the Secondary National Strategy Team who has been working on the question of how to teach interpretation in statistics. He will share the team> '> s findings and provide further insight into how we might stimulate new approaches.
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> N.B. The RSS very much welcomes the opportunity to provide an open forum for fresh thinking concerning the future of the discipline. However, recommendations made by our presenters do not necessarily reflect RSS policy or strategy.
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> Registration information
> There is a conference registration fee of £ 45 (£ 40 for RSS members) and registration for this event includes free entrance to the talk given by Lord Sainsbury at the Mathematics in Education and Industry conference the following day. Please see http://www.rss.org.uk/main.asp?page=2655 for further background information and a registration form and/or get in touch with Debra Hurcomb at the RSS on 020 7614 3934/Fax: 020 7614 3905/E-mail: [log in to unmask] For information on how to reach Reading university campus and to find Palmer Building, please see http://www.reading.ac.uk/maps/whiteknights-struct.htm (the venue is indicated at no 26).
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