ATHENS, Ga. – A national conference on statistics in teacher preparation will be held Oct. 30 – Nov.1 at the Georgia Center for Continuing Education on the University of Georgia campus.
The conference, entitled “Stat/Math TEAMS (Teachers Education: Assessment, Methods and Strategies),” brings together about 20 teams from across the United States. Each team consists of a statistician, a mathematician, a mathematics educator, educators from related disciplines and experienced teachers – all involved in the preparation of future teachers.
“The goals of the conference are to create awareness and mutual understanding of the issues involved in delivering statistical instruction at the K-12 level,” said planning committee cochair Christine Franklin of the statistics department at UGA, “and to build working groups to develop and implement model programs, build a wide network for information exchange and plan future conferences and workshops.”
The American Statistical Association (ASA), the University of Georgia’s Department of Statistics, the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences and the Department of Mathematical Education in the UGA College of Education are hosts for the event.
The conference is being planned by representatives from ASA, the Conference Board of the Mathematical Sciences, the Mathematical Association of America, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics and other leaders in statistics and mathematics education. Two of the seven members of the conference steering committee are from UGA, Christine Franklin and Denise Mewborn of the Department of Math Education.
A new emphasis has been placed on probability and statistics because of recommendations in both the 1989 and 2000 versions of the Principles and Standards for School Mathematics, the National Assessment of Educational Progress framework that recommends more data analysis at the K-12 level. In addition to the explosive growth in advanced placement statistics courses, Franklin said, incredible demands have been placed on many K-12 teachers.
“Building a cadre of teachers who can effectively teach the data analysis called for in these programs depends on improved preservice teacher preparation programs,” she said. “That depends on cooperation among mathematical scientists, including statisticians and teacher educators.”
The conference program will consist of plenary sessions presented by well-known individuals who use statistics in their professions; presentations about current model programs, which includes UGA; presentations about current research on how students learn; and workshops that will provide the participants a sampling of activities used in current model programs and that would allow interaction between the presenter and the team members.
Keynote speakers at the conference will be Peter Holmes, a leading statistical education expert from England; Johnny Lott, president of National Council of Teachers of Mathematics; Richard Scheaffer, past-president of the American Statistical Association; Alan Tucker, lead writer of an important report from the Conference Board of Mathematical Sciences; and Ann Watkins, past- president of Mathematical Association of America. Many leading statistics and mathematics educators will be presenting at breakout sessions during the conference.
Major grant funding for the TEAMS conference is being provided by the American Statistical Association and the National Science Foundation, with additional support from UGA’s Terry College of Business, ExxonMobil, the National Institutes of Health and Thomason-Duxbury.
The next TEAMS conference has been tentatively scheduled for 2005.