New president knows statistics

University of Otago senior lecturer John Harraway has been elected president of the International Association for Statistical Education at a recent World Statistics Congress in Dublin.

Mr Harraway, of the Otago mathematics and statistics department, is looking forward to his "interesting" new part-time role, having been president-elect for the past two years.

IASE has about 400 members, many involved in tertiary education in statistics, in 50 countries.

The organisation seeks to promote, support and improve statistical education throughout the world.

As IASE president, he also becomes a member of the International Statistical Institute Council, which organises the World Statistics Congress every two years.

Education was clearly important in the international development of statistics. In his council role he had been assigned a portfolio involving statistics education and training, with representatives from Australia, the United States and Italy, he said.

New Zealand was regarded as a world leader in the development of the statistics curriculum in schools. The country had been trialling the use of free and powerful statistics software, which enabled pupils to explore "large and interesting" collections of data.

This meant pupils spent less time on data processing, and could spend more time looking for patterns and analysing what they had discovered, he said.

Otago Girls' High School and its mathematics head Jeanette Chapman were leaders in this development.

The software was also being reviewed for use in other countries, and one of his roles as president was to help with these developments.

The IASE also organises conferences in statistics education every year. Last year he chaired an IASE conference, in Slovenia, on teaching statistics, and he was scientific co-ordinator for one in Brazil, in 2006.

• Mr Harraway last year won an Otago University award for teaching excellence.