Report from the JSM 2008 Program Chair

Newsletter for the Section on Statistical Education
Volume 12, Number 2 (Fall 2007)

We have five excellent invited sessions for JSM 2008 (in alphabetical order):

1. Innovative and Controversial Approaches to Student Assessment
2. Pedagogical Issues in an Introductory Statistics Course
3. Stirring the Pot: Radical Ideas in Statistics Education
4. Teaching Introductory Statistics Online
5. Training TAs to Teach in Graduate School and Beyond

With our invited sessions set, now is the time to think about topic-contributed sessions. Why should you organize or participate in a topic-contributed session?

• The format is 5 speakers or 4 speakers and 1 discussant or 3 speakers and 2 discussants.
• This means that there is more time to talk than in contributed sessions (5 people instead of 7 people per session).
• There has been talk about moving in the direction of topic-contributed sessions for future JSM meetings (no regular contributed sessions), so we would be ahead of the curve by having a lot of topic-contributed sessions at JSM 2008.
• Topic-contributed sessions are fun to organize and participate in!

In order to have a topic-contributed session, you must have an organizer, chair, and speakers lined up before ASA opens up the online submission for talks. When speakers sign up to be part of a topic-contributed session, they need to indicate who their organizer is. And, per usual, all participants in topic-contributed sessions (and invited sessions and regular contributed papers, for that matter) do need to pay their registration before the online submission window closes. The window this year is December 3 - February 4.

While I highly encourage our section members to organize topic-contributed sessions, you can also contribute a paper on your own as a contributed paper. Another option for participation is to submit a poster presentation.

Two final things: 1) Please keep in mind the "one talk" rule, which can be found at http://www.amstat.org/meetings/jsm/2008/index.cfm?fuseaction=speakers, and 2) I need to identify people who are willing to chair sessions at JSM 2008.

Please email me at miller.203@osu.edu with any questions regarding our section’s program at JSM 2008 in Denver (August 3-7, 2008). If you are willing to chair a session and/or want to organize a topic-contributed session, please email me so that I can put you on my list of chairs and topic-contributed session organizers.