The future of statistical literacy is t...

This issue of SERJ is a special issue on statistical literacy. The guest editors Jim Ridgway and James Nicholson have adopted an innovative approach: they have invited experts from our community to write essays on the situation and the perspectives of statistical literacy and statistics education. Nearly all of these essays refer to the eminent importance of integrating the new developments of data science into statistics education. As the president of the International Statistical Institute, Pedro Silva do Nascimento, expressed at the opening address at the World Statistics Congress in Rio in 2015, statistics will be revolutionised by the new developments of big data and open data. Another innovation has been to initiate a discussion on inferential statistical tests, especially on null hypothesis significance testing. The intention was first to have a non peer-reviewed series of initial discussion paper by White and Gorard, a reply by the guest editors, followed by a rejoinder of the authors. The reply was regarded as going too far into a general discussion of significance testing, and the originating authors asked that the response be reviewed, which it was. Unfortunately, some wider discussion points were eliminated from the original reply because they referred to other papers of the authors. However, I think that this exchange of ideas is valuable and can initiate further discussions that are so important for shaping the future education of statistics also in the more traditional fields. Eight research papers on various aspects of statistical literacy complete the special issue; for an overview, see the editorial of the guest editors.

There is a further section with regular papers of SERJ not contained in the special issue as SERJ has a substantial backlog of papers and we do not want the authors to be delayed too long. Furthermore, the community should be informed about current research in time as, presumably, the results may influence and inspire further research. We wish all readers to find valuable information and incentives for their own research.