In this paper we report the results from a major UK government-funded project, started in 2005, to review statistics within the school mathematics curriculum for students up to age 16. New teaching materials that explicitly use a problem-solving approach through other subjects have been developed. We will report extensive trialling of these, the development of corresponding new assessment regimes and how these work in the classroom. The new ways of assessing are particularly poignant since, in September 2006, the UK government announced that coursework is to be dropped for mathematics exams sat by 16-year-old. As a consequence, areas of the curriculum previously assessed by coursework, are now being ignored. We will provide some new and useful ways of assessing this content. Our findings have implications for teaching, learning and assessing statistics for students of the subject at all ages.
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