Research

  • This paper reports on an attempt to involve mathematics teachers, with a limited previous experience in exploring statistical concepts, in the collaborative design of computational tools that can be used for simulating data sets. It explores the constructionist conjecture that the design of such tools will encourage designers as learners to reflect upon the statistical concepts incorporated in the tools under development, since generating data-sets on the basis of different characteristics, such as average, spread, or skewness, necessitates the making explicit of thinking related to these notions and the construction of some sense of random processes. It describes how involvement in the design process involved participants in coming to see distributions as statistical entities, with aggregate properties that indicate how their data is centred and spread.

  • We seek to carry out a comparison of the diverse characteristics that are presented in the teaching and learning of Statistics in different university careers. We will compare the Statistics curriculum that are developed in each degree program, the objectives that are pursued, the different didactic methods that are used in each case, the applications used, the work with computer and other simulation instruments and the types of problems that receive larger emphasis in each discipline. From the student's point of view, we are carrying out an investigation that is in a first exploratory phase which will help us to describe the prior knowledge that the students bring when beginning their first statistic course, in connection with the intuitive interpretation of simple statistical graphics, such as graphics of bars and sectors, and interpretation of charts of frequencies.

  • In this paper I summarize my 25 years of research on teaching and learning statistics, as I participated in the emergence of statistics education as a research discipline. This summary and reflection are presented through stories of research projects I have been involved in, all of which involved collaborations with colleagues who have made important contributions to the research and from whom I have learned many important lessons. I summarize and reflect on three interconnected areas of research: synthesizing and building on research studies across diverse disciplines, developing and using good assessment instruments to evaluate and improve student learning, and studying the role of technological tools in developing students' reasoning about specific concepts.

  • In recent years there has been increased attention within both the research and teaching communities of mathematics education to using student work and student thinking to obtain clues about how students develop and construct their mathematical knowledge. Teachers and researchers in statistics education have also begun to look more closely at student work and student thinking on statistics tasks, in order to gain better insights into what their students know about statistical concepts. In this plenary talk I will share some excerpts of Grade 6 - 12 students' thinking and reasoning on several statistical tasks that were designed to probe for students' understandings of variability in data sets and in distributions. Task based interviews on data sets presented to our students in both graphical and tabular form that can provide us with roadmaps to for curriculum decisions to enrich our students' statistical growth whatever their level may be.

  • Istat, the Italian national statistical institute, in co-operation with professors of statistics, scientific societies and experts in web communication, produced The Worth of Data, hypertext materials for promoting and improving statistical literacy. We present the experience from two viewpoints: (i) the process for designing and implementing hypertext; (ii) and the ways selected for improving statistical literacy. The first aspect involved the decision to focus on the concept of awareness: not only as to when and how to use statistical data, but also on how to be discerning about sources, their quality and reliability … The second aspect concerned the language and confirmed that to deliver content in plain language, without losing scientific precision, is indeed a difficult task. To achieve good results, it is necessary to make use of the various skills within a good team. Each expert should give up a little turf and contribute knowledge to attain a common outcome worth communicating.

  • A well known dilemma for statistics educators is that while different groups of students learn best in different ways (see for example Cotts, 1994), usually there are only a few instructors for a course operating within tight time and content constraints, especially at first year university level. I will outline a way of partially accommodating the needs of indigenous and migrant students of first year statistics, arrived at by co-operation with the local community and taking their aspirations into account. We also kept in mind what the students themselves wanted from the course and how they planned to use statistics in their lives. Our programme has achieved successful outcomes for many of these students and while we work within a New Zealand framework there are many aspects of our programme that can be adapted in other countries.

  • This article will discuss the research currently underway at PUC-São Paulo that represents links between Mathematics Education and Statistics Education. We shall discuss how these two areas of knowledge are entwined, verifying the advantages and consequences of these inter-relationships. The National Curriculum Parameters, which specify the Mathematics curriculum for the Brazilian school system, require one block of study involving the discussion of the themes Statistics, Probability, and Discrete Mathematics. These themes are considered throughout the entire 11-year period of basic education (students begin school at age 7) and also in the University. Research related to this problem is beginning to emerge, focusing not only on pre-service or in-service education of teachers, but also related to the learning processes of students, or to research interventions involving both teachers and students.

  • In this study, we examined the role of context knowledge in data analysis tasks and investigated the interplay between students' use of context knowledge and statistical knowledge. Findings showed that knowledge of context was an important factor contributing to students' engagement in statistical tasks. Students used context knowledge in three broad ways: to rationalize the data or their interpretations, in taking a critical stance toward the data, and in ways that were not necessarily productive or pertinent in addressing the task at hand.

  • This study aimed to examine the role knowledge of context plays in supporting or interfering with middle school students' statistical thinking. A model of context knowledge use was developed based on a model of context support developed by Beck, McKeown and McCaslin (1983) to describe students' use of context knowledge. The results of the study showed that students' use of context knowledge fell into three categories.

  • This study investigated the factors that 12th grade students in United Arab Emirates take into consideration when judging the validity of a given statistical generalization, in particular, in terms of the sample size and sample selection bias. The sample consisted of 360 students who had not studied sampling yet. Results show that a small percentage of the students take the sample size and selection bias into consideration properly. Many students based their judgment on their personal beliefs regardless of the properties of the selected sample. This study identified some pre- teaching misconceptions that students have with regard to 'sampling'. Such misconceptions are 'any sample represents the population', and, 'any sample does not represent the population'.

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