PME Stochastics Teaching and Learning Working Group

Letter No 5 - April 1997

Dear Friends,

We promised you a newsletter at the beginning of April, so we are sending out a brief report now. But some of the details we hoped to provide are not yet available, so it seems better to send out a more detailed newsletter in about a month’s time when everything will be in place.

Preparations are in hand for the Meeting at Lahti. Carmen is going to talk to the Advanced Mathematics Thinking Group in detail about our work, with the hope of setting up some collaboration.

We had a number of responses commenting on our proposal for a literature summary/critique. These were generally supportive, but contained some cautions. These will be outlined further in the next newsletter. Kath has invited her Australian Special Interest Group to be involved in the project. The balance of opinion was for a down-loadable WWW format, with the option to obtain the material either on a disk or by hard-copy where there was a demand.

Statistical Variation Abolished

Come to Australia where at least one company has abolished statistical variation. From a recent brochure on bus travel across the country:

Greyhound Pioneer Australia will not accept any variance in kilometer distances from mapping. Distances shown in the brochure apply to this brochure and are not negotiable.

At least something is unchanging in this very uncertain world!

Next Newsletter

We hope to send the next newsletter out in early May. If

you have any special issues to raise, please contact one of

us by 1 May 97.

Carmen Batanero <batanero@goliat.ugr.es>

Kath Truran <Kath.Truran@unisa.edu.au>

John Truran <jtruran@arts.adelaide.edu.au>