Statistical education and general Mathematical education has changed in Argentina in the last decade. The same has happened in many other countries in the world because the need for students to have a satisfactory Statistical training is an important preoccupation in today's information society. Any citizen, not only scientists and technologists, needs to understand the information available. Although changes already exist in the secondary school Mathematics curriculum, the results are not visible in the university classroom where the students' knowledge of statistics or probability are almost none. This paper describes the results of a survey about the previous knowledge of Probability and Statistics in university students before a first and formal statistical course is carried out. The experience was made among students in the geographic area in Argentina namely Litoral area. We try to identify the reasons why teachers tend to teach descriptive Statistics only, a few elements of Probability and nothing of data analysis.
The CAUSE Research Group is supported in part by a member initiative grant from the American Statistical Association’s Section on Statistics and Data Science Education