The Royal Statistical SocietyThe Royal Statistical Society
Teaching Resources

Teaching Statistics
Teaching Statistics is an international journal aimed at teachers of statistics.

The target audience is teachers of students aged up to about 19. This deliberately includes the earlier stages of university courses, but the main focus is on teachers in schools and colleges. This includes teachers of subjects such as economics, biology and geography where a lot of statistics is used, as well as teachers of statistics (often as part of mathematics) as a specialist subject. The articles and other material in the journal are intended to be immediately useful in the classroom.

It is published three times each year by Wiley-Blackwell (formerly Blackwell Publishing) on behalf of the Teaching Statistics Trust.
 

Statistics teachers community 
 We have set up a community for statistics teachers on the National Centre for Excellence in the Teaching of Mathematics (NCETM) website. To access it you will need to register first. Contact Debra Hurcomb for details.


Significance

The Society's quarterly magazine, Significance communicates and demonstrates the practical use of statistics in all walks of life and shows how statistics benefit society. Significance regularly includes case studies, articles (and real datasets) which can be used as the inspiration for classroom materials.
 
The Society's Education Strategy Group (ESG) has initiated a pilot Bringing Significance to the Classroom project: online/offline project of workshops and classroom materials inspired by articles published in Significance. The following materials have been developed so far:
 
 
Babies, bottles and charts a set of resources for KS4 students of Mathematics, Human Biology and/or PHSE, inspired by 'Babies, bottles, breasts: is the WHO health standard relevant?' an article by T. Cole, Professor of Medical Statistics at the Institute of Child Health, London, in Significance, March 2007.
 
The original article can be downloaded from the Blackwell Wiley site: http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/118500353/issue
 
Breast-fed babies put on weight more slowly than bottle-fed babies. Mothers look at the growth charts and worry. The World Health Organization (WHO) has recently published its new growth standard for assessing the growth of young children worldwide.
 
 
Whale of a Time, a set of resources for KS4 students of Mathematics and Statistics, and the Sciences inspired by 'Whale Science and how (not) to use it', an article by Philip Hammond, former Chairman of the IWC, in Significance, June 2006.
 
The original article can be downloaded from the Blackwell Wiley site: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1740-9713.2006.00160.x/abstract
 
A practical classroom exercise which explores the reliability of the Mark Petersen method (basic capture-mark-recapture) of population estimation using great whale conservation as a starting point.
 
 
Time is Right, a set of resources for KS4 students of Mathematics and Statistics, and the Sciences inspired by 'When the time is right: phenology and flowerings', an article by Sandra Bell, a botanist at Kew Gardens, in Significance, September 2009.
 
The original article can be downloaded from the Blackwell Wiley site: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1740-9713.2009.00373.x/abstract
 
2010 is the International Year of Biodiversity. Plants have been flowering much later, butterflies and ladybirds coming out of their winter rest later too. And, as this exercise explores in some detail, birds have been building their nests later than usual. Working with data to analyse and interpret variations in weather and natural events provides some real indicators of climate change, and inspires us to think about how our lives may alter as the climate changes.
 
 
Forecasting Human Sporting Achievement, a set of resources for KS3 and KS4 students of Mathematics and Statistics, and the Sciences inspired by 'Athletics at the Beijing Olympics: how much faster can anyone run?', an article by Joseph Hilbe, Chair of the Sports Statistics Committee of the International Statistical Institute in Significance, December 2008.
 
The original article can be downloaded from the Blackwell Wiley site: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1740-9713.2008.00319.x/abstract
 
Record after record was broken at the Beijing Olympic Games. Some were truly shattered.  The data will help you to predict how much faster men and women can run, swim and jump....
 
 
MATERIALS FOR KS5 coming soon.........
 
 
My statistician could have painted that
 
A set of resources for KS5 students of Mathematics and Statistics and Psychology, inspired by' "A statistical inquiry into modern art" by Mikhail Simkin in Significance, June 2007.  In this article, the author makes a statistical inquiry into doodles and masterpieces to find out whether great abstract art by modern masters is a true expression of genius, or whether a child, a chimpanzee or a statistician, could have done better.  A version of the article can be found online at http://ecclesiastes911.net/properly_prescribed.html)
 
This new set of materials will help to introduce the binomial distribution and show how it can be used and/or to introduce hypothesis testing using the binomial distribution. A TV company is about to stage a modern art show. Thousands of people have applied to be the 'modern art expert'. This exercise shows how, without time to interview them all, a statistics-based test, can weed out those who do not know anything, and ensure that a genuine expert is not missed.....
 
Title tbc
 
A set of resources for KS5 students of Mathematics, Statistics and Business Studies, inspired by 'Managing by fact' and 'Control charts in practice', two articles by Roland Caulcutt of consultancy, Caulcutt Associates, in Significance in March and June 2004 respectively. These articles explained that more and more companies require managers to focus on processes and use of control charts across an organisation, and showed, using a simple graphical technique, how an organisation could do this, and how control charts are set up and used in practice.
 
This new set of materials will offer exercises which use and demonstrate the benefits of statistical control charts (and explain why students' future businesses might need a greenbelt or a blackbelt...).
 
Get in touch
 
If you are a teacher who has developed lesson plans/classroom resources around an article(s) you have read in Significance and are keen to share your work with other teachers (or if you have an idea for materials inspired by Significance and would like to work with an RSS volunteer on developing your idea into classroom materials) please contact Debra Hurcomb at the RSS. 


Debra Hurcomb
Email: d.hurcomb@rss.org.uk 
Tell: 020 7614 3934