Announcing the September meeting of the Statistical Society of Australia, W.A. Branch.

The invited speaker is Prof. Inge Koch of The University of Western Australia. All visitors are welcome to attend this meeting.

Date: Tuesday, 14 September 2021

Time: 6:00PM
Location: Cheryl Praeger Lecture Theatre, The University of Western Australia

Presentation

Attitudes of school students towards mathematics: Findings and some directions for positive improvements of attitudes

Professor Inge Koch, Mathematics and Statistics, The University of Western Australia.

As part of its Choose Maths program the Australian Mathematical Science Institute (AMSI) conducted surveys of school students in order to obtain better insights into `how to improve participation of girls and women in the mathematical sciences education and workforce’. Over a 4-year period from 2016 onwards, Choose Maths staff designed and conducted special Choose Maths classes and collected surveys from more than 8000 students with the aim of evaluating the effectiveness of well-designed `treatment’ on students’ attitudes in pre- and post-surveys.  Questions arising from these Choose Maths classes were:  do girls’ attitudes differ from those of boys? If so, how? Further, can this change be addressed, and can a change of attitude be affected in a positive direction?

In this talk I begin with a brief background on Choose Maths and describe the selection of the Choose Maths schools, the survey design and conduct of the surveys in the 120 schools across Australia.  I will discuss summary statistics of the pre/post surveys which lead to interesting findings on apparent differences in attitudes between boys and girls and between students in primary and secondary schools. A deeper analysis based on multivariate methods allows us to gain more explicit insights into perceived differences between boys’ and girls’ attitudes. These analyses also show that students fall into groups with different change-of-attitude patterns in the pre- and post-surveys and such findings can lead to pathsways for improving attitudes of students towards mathematics.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Inge Koch was appointed Professor of Statistics and Data Science in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, UWA, and started this position in early 2019.  Inge’s research focusses on multivariate and high-dimensional data, analysis of such data, and application of new statistical approaches to diverse domains.  She is interested in statistical learning and in particular in dimension reduction and feature extraction, clustering and classification and sparsity.  She has been collaborating with medical researchers and biochemists on flow cytometry in the detection and progression of diseases, on challenges in cancer research using proteomics mass spectrometry, with electrical engineers on signal processing of fMRI images, and with astronomers on source detection of astronomy surveys.  

As head of Statistics and Data Science at UWA and in her previous work at other Australian universities, Inge has been active in encouraging young women to study and take up careers requiring mathematics. From mid-2015 to early 2019, Inge has been the Executive Director of the Australian Mathematical Sciences Institute and its BHP-funded CHOOSEMATHS program which aims to increase participation of girls and young women in mathematics and STEM.

Refreshments and Dinner

Members and visitors are invited to mingle over wine and cheese from 5:30PM. onwards at the venue.

Following the meeting all are invited to dine with the speaker at a nearby restaurant. Visitors are welcome.

Meeting directions

The Cheryl Praeger Lecture Theatre is located on the ground floor of the Mathematics building at The University of Western Australia. Its entrance is on the northern side of the building. See: OpenStreetMaps, Google Maps (points to the adjacent Blakers Lecture Theatre).

Parking is free on the UWA Crawley campus after 5:00PM. A convenient place to park is Car Park 18 accessible from Fairway Entry 1.

REMOTE viewing options

For those that cannot attend in-person, the presentation will be streamed live over Zoom. Please register on this page to get the connection details.

For further information please contact the WA Branch Secretary (ssa.wa.secretary@gmail.com).