Jennifer J. Kaplan

The Statistical Education Section had a productive JSM 2015 under program chair Erin Blankenship, sponsoring or cosponsoring 11 invited panels/sessions, 10 topic-contributed panels/sessions, nine contributed paper sessions, one traditional poster session, two speed poster sessions, and five roundtables. Pat Humphrey will chair the section’s JSM 2016 program, with Dalene Stangl serving as 2017 section program chair.

Past section chair James Albert and section member David Banks were honored with ASA Founders Awards. In addition, five section members were named ASA Fellows: Erin Blankenship, Johanna Hardin, Ofer Harel, Mary Kwasny, and Juergen Symanzik.

Other education awards were also announced: Rebecca Nugent won the Waller Education Award, W. Robert Stephenson won of the Waller Distinguished Teaching Career Award, and Webster West won the National Mu Sigma Rho 2015 William D. Warde Statistical Education Award.

Also recognized was Nancy Pfenning, who won the section’s Ron Wasserstein Best Contributed Paper Award for her presentation at JSM 2014, “Statistics in Journalism: Guiding Students to Uncrunch the Numbers.” The Jacqueline Dietz Award for the best Journal of Statistics Education paper for 2014 was presented to Jennifer J. Kaplan, John Gabrosek, Phyllis Curtiss, and Chris Malone for their paper, “Investigating Student Understanding of Histograms.”

In addition to the awards announced at JSM, section chair-elect Nicholas Horton was awarded the Robert V. Hogg Award for Excellence in Teaching Introductory Statistics by the MAA SIGMAA on Statistics Education at the 2015 Joint Mathematics Meetings.

Winners of the spring 2015 election for the section are chair-elect Paul Roback, secretary/treasurer Ann Cannon, and executive committee members at large Ulrike Genschel and Brenda Gunderson.

During the business meeting, the committee charged with updating the Guidelines for Assessment and Instruction in Statistics Education (GAISE) College Report requested feedback from the community to ensure the updated guidelines reflect broad points of view. Participate in the feedback survey and GAISE College Report update at the CAUSEweb site.

Planned Statistical Education Section activities for the remainder of the year include a review of the section’s bylaws, coordination with MAA to review guidelines for second courses in statistics and theoretical statistics/mathematical statistics, and the creation of a section officers’ handbook.