By Kristin Kang (University of Northern Colorado) and Robert Powers (University of Northern Colorado)
Information
Our research investigates how a practical teaching experience in a statistics content course helps pre-service teachers (PSTs) gain statistical knowledge for teaching. We also investigate whether the experience helps PSTs differentiate between statistical and mathematical knowledge for teaching. Many K–12 mathematics teachers report feeling unprepared to teach statistics and data science in terms of both content and pedagogy. Despite this, few undergraduate math education programs offer more than one statistics content course. Our program, at a public four-year university, falls into this category and is working on ways to incorporate teacher preparation tasks and practical teaching experiences into the required content course. We present the results of having PSTs prepare and guest-teach a lesson in our 100-level introductory statistics course. The lesson was based on a rich task from the regression unit that the PSTs worked through themselves. We designed our regression task and the practical teaching experience to spark joy and foster critical thinking in both the PSTs and the introductory statistics students. They all had the opportunity to explore a fun application of statistics while learning concepts related to scatterplots, correlation, and regression. The PSTs also discovered what it is like to be in front of a classroom, providing comprehensive and engaging instruction.