In this paper the status, content and assessment of statistics in South African primary and secondary school curricula are discussed. With the new school curriculum, fully implemented in 2005, the scope of statistics has been broadened considerably; teacher training has however not yet caught up with the requirements for the teaching of the subject. A survey of teacher training programmes presented at the universities in South Africa was done to determine the status and content of statistics education in these programmes. Results show that many of these programmes do not yet train statistics teachers adequately for their task to prepare learners to be statistically literate citizens and that very few statistics education research studies on the post graduate level have been completed in the country.
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