The Sixth International Conference on Teaching Statistics (ICOTS) will be held in Durban, South Africa from 7-12 July 2002. The theme of the conference is "Developing a Statistically Literate Society. Details of the Conference are available at <http://www.beeri.org.il/icots6> and details about the South African arrangements at <http://icots.itikzn.co.za/>. Topic 3 is 'Statistics Education at the Post Secondary Level' and within that, Session 3M is 'Hypothesis Testing'. I am the Session Organiser for this session. The session abstract is A more complete title for this session is: "The varied roles of hypothesis testing and their place in statistical literacy". I hope that speakers within the ambit of this topic will address one or more of the following questions. What role or roles does hypothesis testing perform in statistics? If it performs multiple roles, what are the differences between the roles? Does hypothesis testing perform different roles in different disciplines; for example, in social sciences, particularly psychology and education marketing and related business areas finance and related business areas economics and econometrics biological sciences, particularly agriculture and medical research physical sciences? Is hypothesis testing perceived differently in different disciplines? How do these differing roles (if they do differ) influence the way the topic is viewed in these research disciplines? How do they influence the choice of methods used? How do they influence the way hypothesis testing is taught within these disciplines? How should they influence the way it is taught? Can a student in any of these disciplines be regarded as statistically literate if he or she is not strongly familiar with the concepts and techniques of hypothesis testing? Within these 'role' questions speakers may want to refer to 'old faithfuls' such as: What is the significance of a significant p-value? Do hypothesis testing and confidence intervals do the same things? I should be interested to hear of people who would be interested in making a presentation to this topic group before 15 November. At this stage only a suggested title and short abstract is required. Invitations to people whose papers have been accepted will be issued by 31 Jan 2001, and final drafts are due on 1 Dec 2001. Papers which are not specifically accepted for the Topic Group will still be able to be presented in the Contributed Papers Session. All presented papers will be published. Papers will not be refereed, but will normally be allowed to be submitted to a refereed journal after the conclusion of the Conference. Participants are expected to register and attend the conference at their own expense, but some assistance is available for young statisticians from developing countries. -- Alan McLean ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Department of Econometrics and Business Statistics Monash University, Caulfield Campus, Melbourne Tel: +61 03 9903 2102 Fax: +61 03 9903 2007 ================================================================= Instructions for joining and leaving this list and remarks about the problem of INAPPROPRIATE MESSAGES are available at http://jse.stat.ncsu.edu/ =================================================================
