Proceedings CD

Editor’s Preface

The relevance of the ICOTS8 conference theme, towards an evidence-based society, to a wide variety of disciplines is reflected in the diverse range of papers that have been submitted for publication. Altogether there have been 225 invited papers and 123 contributed papers included in the proceedings. These, together with the poster presentations, serve to demonstrate the popularity of the ICOTS conference for sharing ideas and findings with a truly international community. Thank you to all those who have contributed to producing such a comprehensive ICOTS8 conference and proceedings and thus contributed to the improvement of the teaching and learning of statistics across the world.

It has been an honour for me to have the chance to edit the proceedings. I have enjoyed considerably working in cooperation with the international programming committee to call for papers, review papers and finalise papers to be included in the proceedings. Refereeing papers for an international conference such as ICOTS8 is a complex process that relies on the goodwill of those researchers involved in the field, in this case statistics education. The refereeing process for ICOTS papers is optional but the number of papers submitted to the refereeing process has increased by nearly 25% on those submitted for ICOTS7. A total of 171 papers were reviewed for ICOTS8 by three, and in some cases, four peers. Of these papers 65% were designated as having been accepted by the review process and designated as ‘refereed’ in the proceedings.

More than 360 people were invited to referee papers and of these, 171 people actually reviewed papers. These reviewers represent 29 different countries, which serves to bring a broad set of perspectives to the research arena. I would like to thank all these reviewers for their time and effort in reviewing the papers. Without this commitment it would not be possible to have the important ‘referee’ status assigned to papers in the proceedings. The quality of these papers is a tribute to the authors and also to the reviewers who have guided any necessary improvement.

Enough thanks cannot be expressed to John Shanks, Web Master for ICOTS8, for dynamically building onto the online system that was introduced for ICOTS7. This facilitated the management of the reviewing process and uploading of papers and we anticipate that it will be a responsive system for future use. Whatever I asked, John would work out a way of tweeking the system to comply. I would like to thank the ICOTS7 Proceedings editors for advice, especially in relation to potential reviewers. Also, thank you to John Harraway, Helen Macgillivray, Roxy Peck and Andrej Blejec who provided moral support and guidance when it was needed as well as adjudicating on those difficult decisions. The ICOTS8 conference and proceedings are a credit to a large group of people and everyone should be proud of the outcome.

Chris Reading
Editor of Proceedings ICOTS-8