Reported by Larry Lesser, Section Publications Chair

Winners of the spring 2011 election for the section include chair-elect Deb Nolan, Council of Sections representative Paul Roback, and at-large members Nathan Tintle and Amy Froelich.

The section newsletter publication schedule is changing from semiannual to annual (early fall) as an archival digest, with more timely communications and announcements handled through the ASA Community site.

This year, the section contributed support toward the Mathematical Association of America’s Project NeXT and the research conference on Statistical Research, Teaching, and Literacy, hosted by Utrecht University, the Netherlands. Funding requests are due by February 1, 2012, to Robert Gould at rgould@stat.ucla.edu.

The section had a productive JSM 2011, sponsoring or cosponsoring 10 invited panels/sessions, seven topic-contributed panels/sessions, seven contributed paper sessions, six roundtable discussions, a poster session, and a continuing education course.

At the plenary awards session, there was a number of section members recognized. Section members Deborah A. Nolan (University of California, Berkeley), Herbert I. Weisberg (Correlation Research, Inc.,), and Lori A. Thombs (University of Missouri) were announced as ASA Fellows and statistical education was mentioned in several other new ASA Fellows’ blurbs as well.

The Waller Education Award for outstanding innovation in the teaching of elementary statistics was presented to University of Minnesota’s Michelle Everson, who is also the section’s program chair for JSM 2012.

Also listed in the JSM awards ceremony program was the debut of the Journal of Statistics Education (JSE) Best Paper Award, which recognizes the best paper from the previous year’s issues of JSE and is named in honor of a particular person for her/his contributions to statistics education. The $1,500 award for the best 2010 JSE paper honors JSE founding editor Jackie Dietz and was presented to Nicholas J. Horton, Maxine Pfannkuch, Matt Regan, and Chris Wild for their March 2010 paper, “Telling Data Stories: Essential Dialogues for Comparative Reasoning.”