Research

  • The project will research the effectiveness of new information and communication technologies in teaching various scientific and mathematical concepts at secondary level. The project focuses in particular on the analysis of complex data. We will use and adapt innovative instructional material and analyze students' competencies by means of classroom observations and clinical interviews. The interactive constitution of meaning in classroom discourse will be analyzed by means of new interpretative methods of research into classroom interactions. Our goal is to identify and describe more precisely various conceptual barriers that make statistical reasoning difficult for secondary students and to develop and test an instructional sequence that would enable such reasoning at a rudimentary, but statistically valid, level. The project is situated in the context of interdisciplinary research in mathematics education (didactics of mathematics) with relations to the didactics of the sciences.

  • Psychology students usually rate Statistics courses among the most difficult. The objective of the present study is to explore some aspects of the difficulties encountered by Psychology students in studying statistics and how these difficulties relate to statistics anxiety. A questionnaire measuring Psychology students' evaluation of the level of difficulty of the statistics courses studied; together with their opinions concerning the reasons for these difficulties was administered to a sample of 152 female undergraduate Psychology students at Cairo University. In addition, a measure of statistics anxiety was also used. Difficulties reported by students were in five categories in the following order: course content, teaching, examinations, relevance of statistics, and student characteristics. The perceived level of difficulty and abstraction were related to attitudes and opinions towards statistics and to the grades of the previous year.

  • This work has as objective to verify if the socioeconomic relation of the students of two schools of the metropolitan area of Belém, one of a public school and another of a private school, interferes in the habit of reading of the same ones. To obtain those results the techniques statistical Analysis of Correspondence and Faces of Chernoff were used to present those students' profile.

  • This work describes the use of statistics made by graduate students in the field of Educational Psychology at the National Pedagogical University, when writing their theses or dissertations in support of their candidature for a degree of professional qualification. The results show that, in general, the thesis writers used statistical analyses when their investigation required them; however, it was found that students mainly have the following difficulties: a) their choice of a suitable statistical test concerning their objective of research; b) the way of interpreting data; c) selection of the design consistent with their objectives; d) in their comprehension of the meaning of some statistical concepts; e) in their decision use of charts or graphs. Finally the work concludes by discussing the pertinence of the contents, strategies and procedures of instruction and evaluation of courses in statistics.

  • SATS survey data collected from three introductory statistics courses - college algebra-based, college calculus-based, and a high school AP course. Instructors of these courses also completed a questionnaire concerning their approach to a 1st course in statistics. What are the similarities and differences in the students' attitudes to each instructor's approach?

  • The hierarchical linear models or multilevels were developed for analysis of data which possess group structure, that is, a structure hierarchy which takes in account the data variability inside and among each hierarchical level. By using data analysis from SAEPE (2002 Educational Evaluation System of Pernambuco), hierarchical models (MH) are presented with two levels of evaluation in mathematics and Portuguese language classes applied to the 4th and 8th grades students of fundamental teaching and to the students 3rd grade students medium teaching. The results in this modeling are more appropriate due to data group structure. A comparison between multiple regression models and hierarchical models shows a better performance of the second model.

  • In this study a hierarchy of consideration of variation was developed from students' responses to a questionnaire given at the beginning of a tertiary introductory statistics course. The hierarchy was then used to code responses to the same questionnaire post-study. Comparison of student performances showed that the development of consideration of variation differs with the context of the question. The proposed hierarchy could provide a basis for a more general hierarchy of consideration of variation that is applicable across a variety of tasks. It also supports educators in identifying the level of a student's consideration of variation, providing direction for teaching and learning activities that will help that consideration develop.

  • This paper reports on data from a large study which explored form five (14 to 16-year-olds) students' ideas in statistics (probability, descriptive statistics, graphical representations, investigations). This paper discusses the ways in which students made sense of probability tasks obtained from the individual interviews. The findings revealed that many of the students used strategies based on beliefs, prior experiences and intuitive strategies. Additionally, in some cases the meaning intended by myself on the interview tasks was not that constructed by the students. As a result, students constructed responses based on these unintended interpretations. While students showed more competence on the formal item, they were less competent on the question involving an everyday context. This inconsistency could be due to contextual or linguistic issues. The paper concludes by suggesting some implications for further research.

  • The relationship between mathematics and statistical reasoning frequently receives comment (Vere-Jones 1995, Moore 1997); however most of the research into the area tends to focus on mathematics anxiety. Gnaldi (2003) showed that in a statistics course for psychologists, the statistical understanding of students at the end of the course depended on students' basic numeracy, rather than the number or level of previous mathematics courses the student had undertaken. As part of a study into the development of statistical thinking at the interface between secondary and tertiary education, students enrolled in an introductory data analysis subject were assessed regarding their statistical reasoning, basic numeracy skills, mathematics background and attitudes towards statistics. This work reports on some key relationships between these factors and in particular the importance of numeracy to statistical reasoning.

  • This paper is part of a research study, the objective of which is to investigate the meaning of confidence intervals for first year students in the Statistics course in the Universidad Nacional de Rosario. Within the framework of Godino's theory (1999), by means of students' dialogues in front of the computer, we try to surmise the presence of the diverse elements of meaning - extensive, ostensive, actuating, intensive and validating - which reveal the topic comprehension. Statistical inference is one of the largest branches of Statistics and a fundamental methodological tool in the empiric sciences, in particular. It allows us to quantify our confidence in conclusions drawn from random samples, and therefore, to verify our impressions by means of calculations (Batanero, 2001); hence, the importance of an updated teaching.

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