Journal Article

  • The official inclusion of the teaching of graphing in school curricula has motivated<br>increasing research and innovative pedagogical strategies such as the use of media graphs in school<br>contexts. However, only a few studies have investigated knowledge about graphing among those who will<br>teach this curricular content. We discuss aspects of the interpretation of media graphs among primary school<br>student teachers from Brazil and England. We focus on data which came from questionnaires and interviews<br>which gives evidence of the mobilisation of several kinds of knowledge and experiences, in the<br>interpretation of media statistical graphs. The discussion of results might contribute to an understanding of<br>the complexity of the interpretation of such graphs, and to the development of pedagogical strategies which<br>can help teachers think about the teaching and learning of statistics in ways that will support the balance of<br>these kinds of knowledge.

  • This report focuses on in-service teachers' planning of stochastic education. The theoretical<br>and methodological settings of the research will be outlined in-depth. The methodological settings will be<br>illustrated by research results concerning one teacher. A further main focus is to present some results<br>concerning the planning of stochastic education conducted by 13 teachers.

  • This research focuses on fourth-grade (9-year-old) students' informal and intuitive<br>conceptions of probability and distribution revealed as they worked through a sequence of tasks. These<br>tasks were designed to study students' spontaneous reasoning about distributions in different settings and<br>their understanding of probability of various binomial random events that they explored with a set of<br>physical chance mechanisms. The data were gathered from a pilot study with four students. We analyzed<br>the interplay of reasoning about distribution and understanding of probability. The findings suggest that<br>students' qualitative descriptions of distributions could be developed into the quantification of probabilities<br>through reasoning about data in chance situations.

  • We report a study where 195 students aged 12 to 15 years were presented with computerbased<br>tasks that require reasoning with multivariate data, together with paper-based tasks from a well<br>established scale of statistical literacy. The computer tasks were cognitively more complex, but were only<br>slightly more difficult than paper tasks. All the tasks fitted well onto a single Rasch scale. Implications for<br>the curriculum, and public presentations of data are discussed.

  • Construing a collection of values of a sample statistic as a distribution is central to<br>developing a coherent understanding of statistical inference. This paper discusses key developments that<br>unfolded over three consecutive lessons in a classroom teaching experiment designed to support a group of<br>high school students in developing such a construal. Instruction began by engaging students in activities<br>that focused their attention on the variability among values of a common sample statistic. There occurred a<br>critical shift in students' attention and discourse away from individual values of the statistic and toward a<br>collection of such values as a basis for inferring the value of a population parameter. This was followed by<br>their comparisons of such collections and by the emergence and application of a rule for deciding whether<br>two such collections were similar. In the repeated application of their decision rule students structured these<br>collections as distributions. We characterize aspects of these developments in relation to students'<br>classroom engagement, and we explore evidence in students' written work that points to how instruction<br>shaped their conceptions.

  • The ability to analyse qualitative information from quantitative information, and/or to create<br>new information from qualitative and quantitative information is the key task of statistical literacy in the<br>21st century. Although several studies have focussed on critical evaluation of statistical information, this<br>aspect of research has not been clearly conceptualised as yet. This paper presents a hierarchy of the<br>graphical interpretation component of statistical literacy. 175 participants from different educational levels<br>(junior high school to graduate students) responded to a questionnaire and some of them were also<br>interviewed. The SOLO Taxonomy was used for coding the students' responses and the Rasch model was<br>used to clarify the construction of the hierarchy. Five different levels of interpretations of graphs were<br>identified: Idiosyncratic, Basic graph reading, Rational/Literal, Critical, and Hypothesising and Modelling.<br>These results will provide guidelines for teaching statistical literacy.

  • Statistical charts can be used with very young children in order for them to understand and communicate effectively in other subject areas. This practical activity was aimed at understanding more about forces.

  • This article re-examines the much maligned piechart<br>and provides justification for its use. It identifies<br>common pitfalls when drawing piecharts in Microsoft<br>Excel and offers advice on how to avoid them.

  • This short article gives a geometrical interpretation of the relationship between the harmonic mean, the arithmetic mean and the self-weighted mean.

  • Our pig game involves a series of tosses of a die with the possibility of a player's score improving with each additional toss. With each additional toss, however, there is also the chance of losing the entire score accumulated so far. Two different strategies for deciding how many tosses a player should attempt are developed and then compared in terms of expected score.

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