30 Years of the Journal of Statistics and Data Science Education

My name is Nicholas Horton from Amherst College and I am the incoming editor of the Journal of Statistics and Data Science Education. It may be hard to believe, but this is the first issue of the 30th annual volume of what was originally the Journal of Statistics Education. Time flies!

To celebrate the upcoming milestone, a fall 2021 CAUSE/JSDSE webinar discussed the founding of the journal. It featured Tim Arnold (founding managing editor), Joan Garfield (founding member of the editorial board), Jeff Witmer (founding member of the editorial board), and Daniel Solomon (former chair of the North Carolina State University Statistics Department). Sadly, founding editor Jackie (E. Jacquelin) Dietz passed away in 2020 and was unable to share her wisdom. Jackie made the vision of the journal a reality in so many ways, not just by serving as editor from 1993–2000 (see Rossman and Dietz 2011). Jackie’s memory lives on in so many ways, including as the namesake for the journal’s best paper award.

The webinar helped to illuminate how these individuals and the leadership at NC State, the original institutional sponsor for the journal, helped the journal to take root and blossom. This was an exciting time for statistics, technology, and the profession.

In a paper in the first issue, Tim Arnold described the goals of the journal:

“The Journal of Statistics Education (JSE) was created in order to provide an outlet for high-quality articles on statistics education and to provide a vehicle through which statistics educators can share their knowledge and be recognized for their work. The electronic computer network was chosen as the medium in which to publish the JSE because of the reduced costs of making the journal available and the exciting opportunities made possible in the medium. With the absence of printing costs, low dissemination costs and the contribution of technical, editorial, and referee services, the JSE can be distributed on the Internet computer network at no cost to the reader.

Once the decision was made to use the electronic medium for publishing, another set of goals became apparent: to keep the contents of the journal as accessible as possible to as many people as possible, yet still use the latest technology to exploit the electronic medium.” (Arnold 1993)

Much has changed in the journal world in the intervening decades and the scope of the journal has broadened. But the vision of an open-access resource (for readers and authors) that utilized electronic dissemination has continued to benefit the community and countless instructors and students.

Any anniversary provides an opportunity to reflect. As the incoming editor, I took the opportunity to review the founding of the journal (originally the Journal of Statistics Education) and reread the papers published in that first issue.

These included Tim’s description of the structure and philosophy of the journal, a listing of the founding editorial board, the first Datasets and Stories article (Lock 1993), Joan Garfield’s article on teaching statistics using small-group learning (Garfield 1993), and the first teaching bits article (Garfield and Snell 1993). This latter article featured a survey of recent publications of interest, including some gems such as a paper on baseball in CHANCE magazine by Bill James, Jim Albert, and Hal Stern.

That first issue also included a report on an NSF conference on statistics education by the late George Cobb (1993). While reports in this genre have a reputation for being dry and stilted, George laid down a compelling call for action:

“In our particular field, the usual herd of cud-chewing introductory courses has been a standing fact of life for much too long. However, the various curricular projects summarized in Section 2 represent a hard and encouraging look forward. If more and more of us stare harder and harder, I think it is reasonable to hope that most of the old curricular ruminants will eventually turn tail and run (Cobb 1993).”

While we’ve made a lot of progress, there’s a lot of work still needed. I’m honored and privileged to have been named the editor for the journal and to help carry forward this vision. I hope that you find the papers in the journal help you to improve statistics and data science education and consider submitting papers to the journal that would be of interest to others.

I’m hugely appreciative of the efforts of former editor Jeff Witmer, editorial coordinator Jean Scott, ASA journals manager Eric Sampson, our team of associate editors, countless reviewers, and our colleagues at Taylor & Francis that led to the review and publications of the six original articles, a health sciences article, an interview, a brief communication, and a datasets and stories article that appear in this issue. I’m looking forward to building on the initiatives and efforts that Jeff and the entire editorial board have made real.

I’ll close with one more quote of a quote from Tim Arnold’s (1993) structure and foundation paper:

“You drop a stone in a pool and the circles spread. But on what far shore of the pool does the last circle break?” (from “As It Was in the Beginning,” Stephen Vincent Benet)

I’m excited to see what the future holds and what circles are yet to come.