Research

  • Numerous researchers and educators lament the poor state of statistical literacy and statistical skills in the population. However, few authors base their arguments on actual results from comparative or large-scale studies which provide stable, population-level estimates of performance. This talk will present and discuss selected results regarding statistical skills of adults in multiple countries, based on analysis of two data sources. Secondary analyses of data from the International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS), conducted in 1994-1998 in over 20 countries, were performed with regard to items assessing understanding of bar graphs and pie charts. Implications will be discussed in terms of the need for teaching statistics with a focus on interpretation and communication and on using real-life contexts and tasks in instruction. Conclusions will also be presented regarding the importance of conducting analytic assessments which shed light on multiple types and levels of statistical skills.

  • In line with the reform efforts in statistics education that emphasized the development of statistical literacy skills, we explored instructional goals and classroom practices of 12 college statistics teachers and analyzed them using Gal's statistical literacy model. Through focus group discussions, we find that their goals and practices in the teaching-learning-assessment cycle are primarily based on mathematical and statistical knowledge and only three displayed evidence of literacy and context knowledge, and the capability for critical questions. While these teachers indicated positive attitude towards the promotion of statistical literacy, there are gaps between attitude and classroom implementations. Aside from the need for alignment of instruction and assessment with this goal, there is need for concerted efforts towards equipping statistics teachers with the knowledge and resources necessary in the promotion of statistical literacy.

  • In this paper, we examine some results from a series of interviews carried out by e-mail with an international group of statistics educators, all of them members of the International Association for Statistical Education (IASE). We asked for their ideas on the qualities of 'good' statistics teachers and ways in which they could develop as statistics educators. Follow-up questions explored their answers in depth. The responses highlight the diversity of views about recognising and developing good statistics teachers at tertiary level, an important consideration for any discussion on professional practice and certification in statistics education.

  • The International Association for Statistical Education, IASE, has a very strong commitment to the general development of statistical educators including research and the sharing of ideas and experiences. In particular the IASE/ISI satellite meetings are always very friendly, informative affairs as was the one in Sydney April 4-5, 2005. The theme was Statistics Education and the Communication of Statistics, it was jointly organised by the IASE and the Victorian Branch of the Statistical Society of Australia and immediately preceded the ISI session in Sydney. The theme of the conference was chosen because some IASE members felt that the communication of statistical methods and results needed more emphasis in our courses and wished to draw the attention of statistics educators to this area to encourage development and innovation. This paper summarises the main points the speakers made and the main issues that emerged.

  • During a research project investigating understanding of variation students in a tertiary level introductory statistics course completed a questionnaire prior to, and at the end of, the course. This paper reports on interviews of selected students designed to determine whether more information could be gathered, and to identify those teaching and learning activities that assisted students to develop understanding. Prompting assisted students to develop better quality responses but cognitive conflict situations proved challenging. The diversity of activities identified by students as assisting development of understanding provides a challenge for educators in planning teaching sequences. Both educators and researchers need to listen to students to better understand the development of reasoning.

  • Year 11 (15-year-old) students are not exposed to formal statistical inferential methods. Therefore, when drawing conclusions from data, their reasoning must be based mainly on looking at graph representations. This study investigates the type of reasoning that might develop students' informal inferential statistical reasoning towards a more formal level. A perspectives model is developed for a teacher's informal inferential reasoning from the comparison of boxplots. The model is then used to analyse her students' responses to an assessment task. The resultant analysis produced a conjectured hierarchical model for students' reasoning. The implications of the findings for instruction are discussed.

  • Reasoning proportionally about collections of a sample statistic's values is central to developing a coherent understanding of statistical inference. This paper discusses key developments that unfolded in a classroom teaching experiment designed to support students constructing such understanding. Instruction engaged students in activities that focused their attention on the variability among outcomes of randomly drawn samples. There occurred a critical shift in students' attention and discourse away from individual sample outcomes and toward the distribution of a collection of sample outcomes. This shift supported further developments concerning how to compare entire distributions of sample outcomes as a basis for conceptualizing a notion of statistical unusualness. We characterize aspects of these developments in relation to students' classroom engagement.

  • Data and chance are the two related topics that deal with uncertainty. On the discussions of probability and statistics in both research and instruction, the existing literature depicts an artificial separation, to which other researchers (Shaughnessy, 2003; Steinbring, 1991) have already called attention in recognition of the inseparable nature of data and chance. Hence, this paper addresses how to integrate the discussions of distributions and probability, starting from the elementary grades. We report on a study that examines fourth-grade students' informal and intuitive conceptions of probability and distribution through a sequence of tasks for developing their understandings about probability distributions. These tasks include various random situations that students explore with a set of physical chance mechanisms and that can be modeled by a binomial probability distribution.

  • In this research we approach a fundamental stochastic idea. The random variable is based on other mathematics and probabilistic concepts and, in turn, is the support of many probability and statistics subjects. In this paper, we present some results from an exploratory study carried out with two university students. The aim was observing the difficulties the students face when they try to solve a problem that involves the concept of random variable.

  • In this paper we discuss the teacher's role in the introduction of probability to students aged from 11 to 18 years old. Coutinho (2001) has showed that model-building approaches enable students to attend to the duality of the probability concept. However, Gonçalves (2004) argues that teachers do not easily appropriate such teaching situations, because their conception are associated with their own practices, built from classic approaches to probability. In this paper, we discuss a teacher education project on teaching and learning probability problems, in which teachers and researchers collaborate during face-to-face and virtual sessions, to reflect upon and about teaching practices and especially about the possibilities associated with a model-building approach to probability.

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