Supporting Teachers' Understanding Of Statistical Data Analysis: Learning Trajectories As Tools For Change

This paper provides an analysis of a Teacher Development Experiment (Simon, 2000) designed to support teachers' understandings of statistical data analysis. The experiment addresses the following research question: Can the results from research conducted in a middle-grades mathematics classroom be used to guide teachers' learning? In both cases, activities from an instructional sequence designed to support the development of ways to reason statistically about data were the basis of engagement. Analyses of the episodes in this paper document that the learning trajectory that emerged from the teachers' activity did, in many significant ways, parallel that of the students.