Description: Read the December 2019 issue of Expanding Horizons, published by the Education and Research Section. Newsletters provide practical information for the working actuary, articles on trends that impact sections and news about section activities.

Description: An article giving a summary of the Asia Pacific Teaching Conference that took place in Bangkok in December 2022. This article will be disseminated via SOA News Weekly, which will link to the article on soa.org.

Description: A description of a new award for outstanding educators in actuarial science.

Description: The University of International Business and Economics (UIBE) in Beijing has been named a new SOA Center of Actuarial Excellence (CAE).

Description: Schaumburg, IL, June 23, 2022 – The Society of Actuaries (SOA) has recognized Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and the University of California, Santa Barbara (UC Santa Barbara) in the U.S., as Centers of Actuarial Excellence (CAE). These two universities join the ranks of 35 other CAEs around the world.

Description: Traditionally the SOA formulates pedagogic excellence in terms of the Marzano Taxonomy. For example, the "analysis level" consisting of generalization, specification, classification, contrast, matching, and error identification, is considered superior to the "retrieval level" consisting of rote memorization such as recognition, recall, and using. In this presentation, we first show that pedagogic excellence can be equivalently, but more simply, formulated in terms of executive function and goal-setting. Here executive function refers to problems requiring multiple mental modalities - such as, formal, verbal, computational, and graphical - for their solution. Goal-setting refers to the skillful breakup of a complex problem into a sequence of subgoals each of which is clearly formulated, challenging, but achievable timely. Light examples from the literature illustrate these concepts. Five "challenging FM problems": reinvestment, refinancing, multiple rate/deposit problems, pricing deferred bonds using a term structure, and obscure loan problems, illustrate the following fundamental techniques of goal-setting and executive function: i) a fellowship approach to teaching preliminary exam material, ii) using subgoals to give difficult homework, iii) alternating between different mental modalities to achieve elegant brevity in solutions, iv) goal-setting reflecting familiar vs. new, and v) skillful definition of unit subgoals.

Description: The Actuary Vol. 22, No. 11. The Subcommittee on Minority Recruiting, which actively encourages qualified minority students to enter the actuarial profession, has just released its new brochure for use in minority recruiting.

Description: The Society of Actuaries (SOA) is dedicated to advancing education and research for the actuarial profession. As part of its mission, the SOA recognizes the importance of partnering with colleges and universities to help develop future actuaries. With this in mind, the SOA’s Research Department is holding a Student Research Case Study Challenge, which provides an opportunity for teams of students to apply their actuarial skills on a real-world problem in a business setting.

Description: This is the presidential address by former President of the Society of Actuaries, Malvin E. Davis. His topic was the current position of the American United States and Canadian life insurance actuary, the problems that face him and the Society of Actuaries, and what the Society should do to address those problems.

Description: This article is about the Society is becoming significantly more active on the international scene. Specifically, the activities of ambassadorial visits to Asia and Australia were described.