Topics from Australian Conferences on Teaching Statistics, 1

The education of future consumers, users, producers, developers and researchers of statistics is both challenging and important for a modern information society. Hence statistical education is of vital significance to all disciplines and the whole community, as well to all statisticians and the statistical profession across the spectrum of educational levels and disciplines. The first OZCOTS was in 1998, inspired by the papers by Australians at the 5th International Conference on Teaching Statistics. OZCOTS were held as stand-alone two-day conferences in 1999-2002. The awarding of one of the first Australian Learning and Teaching Council s Senior Fellowships to a statistician reflected the importance of statistics education. The fellowship programme included reviving OZCOTS but as a two-day satellite to the 2008 Australian Statistical Conference (ASC), with a one-day overlap open to all ASC delegates. OZCOTS 2008 was modelled on the successful International Association for Statistical Education s (IASE) satellite conferences to ISI World Statistics Congresses, with papers in proceedings and an optional refereeing process offered to authors. The success of OZCOTS 2008 leads to OZCOTS 2010 and OZCOTS 2012. Authors of selected papers from these OZCOTS were invited to build on their OZCOTS papers and to submit them for refereeing, thus creating this collection of the best from OZCOTS 2008-2012. In 2008, 2010, 2012, the Australian Conferences on Teaching Statistics (OZCOTS 6-8) were held as satellites to the Australian Statistical Conferences, with themes reflecting the importance of statistical education to the whole statistical profession. OZCOTS6 in 2008 was associated with Professor Helen MacGillivray s Australian Senior Fellowship program entitled The teaching and assessment of statistical thinking within and across disciplines. OZCOTS7 in 2010 had the theme Building capacity in statistics education and the theme of OZCOTS8 in 2012 was Statistics education for greater statistics.