Envisioning Change in the Statistics-Education Climate.

Abstract

The African Data Initiative started as a crowd-sourced campaign to improve the teaching of statistics in African universities. The analysis of climate data provides one suitable context to illustrate ideas that lead to a radical new form of teaching. The problem within the context comes first, the technicalities are largely reduced–mathematics is supported by meta knowledge and backed up by modelling; calculations are reduced by user-friendly software that is also used by experts. The problems are treated similarly to research questions and the results are often easier to interpret, making sense as potential answers in their context. The criteria of this approach are compared to the framework proposed by WG Cobb to reform statistics education in the light of the latest developments in statistics, driven by the huge increase of data. Implementation details are presented around three components: case studies, data, and the …