Newsletter for the Section on Statistical Education
Volume 12, Number 2 (Fall 2007)
The Joint ASA/AMATYC Committee has gone through a change in name and charge. The committee did not fit into the current structure of AMATYC, and AMATYC asked that the committee be re-conceptualized. The committee is now an ASA-only committee called the Committee on Statistics in Two-Year Colleges. In addition to no longer being a joint-institution committee, the charge encompasses statistics instruction in all two-year institutions. However, the charge and activities of the committee remain essentially the same, and the makeup of the committee includes at least two members who are faculty at a two-year college.
The committee has proposed a summer institute titled "GAISEing Beyond the Crossroads: Improving Instruction in Introductory Statistics" to the American Mathematics Association of Two-Year Colleges (AMATYC). The five-day workshop, to be held June 15-20, 2008, at Cape Cod Community College, will provide participants with direct experience to help them develop classroom activities and assessments that are aligned with both the ASA-endorsed Guidelines for Assessment and Instruction in Statistics Education (GAISE) and recommendations in the AMATYC publication, Beyond Crossroads. Each participant will be part of a team that develops a lesson plan and materials that can be incorporated into an introductory statistics course. The workshop is aimed towards statistics faculty at two-year colleges, and workshop instructors include faculty from both four-year and two-year institutions. The workshop is funded by a CAUSEway grant and supported by AMATYC. The AMATYC Board provided positive reviews of the preliminary proposal submitted last spring and will make a decision on the final proposal in late October.