Reported by Larry Lesser
The Statistics Education Section had a productive JSM 2012 under the direction of section Program Chair Michelle Everson, sponsoring or co-sponsoring 11 invited panels/sessions, 14 topic-contributed panels/sessions, 10 contributed paper sessions, 12 roundtable discussions, and a poster session.
Also, many section members were recognized. Michael Posner won the 2012 Waller Education Award; Thomas Willemain won the National Mu Sigma Rho’s 2012 William D. Warde Statistical Education Award; and Anna Jonsdottir, a student at the University of Iceland, won the section’s best contributed paper of JSM 2011. This latter award will henceforth be named for ASA Executive Director and longtime education advocate Ron Wasserstein. Additionally, Melissa Begg, Rob Gould, Nick Horton, Michael Larsen, R. Todd Ogden, Thaddeus Tarpey, and Rebecca Zwick became ASA Fellows.
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 JSE founding editor Jackie Dietz, also was awarded at JSM 2012. The $1,500 award for the best 2011 JSE paper was presented to Nathan Tintle, Jill VanderStoep, Vicki-Lynn Holmes, Brooke Quisenberry, and Todd Swanson for their paper “Development and Assessment of a Preliminary Randomization-Based Introductory Statistics Curriculum” in the March issue. Another winner was John Gabrosek, who received a “retiring editor certificate of appreciation” for his work as 2010–2012 JSE editor.
Along with the award winners, the 2012 section officers were announced. The officers include Amy Wagaman, 2013 JSM Program chair; Jim Albert, chair-elect; Dexter Whittinghill, secretary/treasurer; and Brigitte Baldi and Herle McGowan, Executive Committee at large members. Also, Dick De Veaux was elected as a Council of Sections Board representative and Tom Short was elected vice chair of the Council of Sections Governing Board.
At the section’s business meeting, committees were formed in membership/fundraising, Common Core, Fellows nominations, and GAISE revision. Patty Frazer Lock gave a progress report on MAA guidelines for introductory statistics courses taken by mathematical sciences majors.
This year, the section contributed support toward the Mathematical Association of America’s Project NeXT. Funding requests are due by February 1, 2013, to Deborah Nolan at Nolan@stat.berkeley.edu.
The section newsletter publication schedule changed last year from semiannual to annual (early fall) as an archival digest, with members and officers able to relay more timely communications and post announcements through the centralized communication tools of the Section’s ASA Community site under “My Communities”.
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