Literature Index

While there has been an impact on how statistics is being taught and increased satisfaction with the course, we still fall short of giving students the experiences they need to freely use statistical thinking and correct reasoning when they approach novel problems. While an introductory course cannot make novice students into expert statisticians, it should develop statistical thinking that can be applied to real world situations. Despite the proliferation of high quality new materials and technological tools, many instructors take a "black box" approach: simply using the materials and tools will somehow magically develop students' statistical thinking. What is needed is a method of teaching that is constantly linked to the goal of statistical thinking and provides teachers with the mechanism to evaluate how this goal is impacted by their teaching.

Productive reasoning of any kind is achieved through heuristics, and motivated by an anticipatory approach structured as intuition. This recognition has had important consequences in thinking about probability, since the intuitive substrate available in this domain is relatively inconsistent and ambiguous. A proper curriculum of probability learning should, then, take into account this primary intuitive substrate, and concern itself with improving it and with finding methods of building new intuitions which are readily compatible with it. Two main directions of research have been taken in relation to the formation of the concept of probability. The first originated by Tolman and Brunswick, concerns what has been termed probability learning. The second main line of research concerns the organisation of conceptual schemas in the domain of probability: the development of concepts such as chance, proportion, and the estimation of odds, and the development on children of the concepts and procedures of combinatorial analysis. These two directions of research are focussed on rather different problems, and the techniques they use are, consequently, different. Yet, as will be seen in the following chapters, their findings can be successfully combined in an effort to reach a unified view of this area.

The first aim of this project was improving the knowledge of the censuses and their function and importance for the Country. The second aim was disseminating numeracy among the students of primary and secondary schools. ISTAT organized a simulated census asking students to answer a questionnaire that contains special questions for children (how many times can you bound back a balloon in fifteen seconds?) and other real official statistics questions, easy enough for children (way of reaching school in the morning; what was eaten at breakfast, atcivities in the free time). The students followed every step of the collecting process, even making exsercises using their own figures, then they sent the figures to ISTAT using an electronic form filled in on- line by Internet. ISTAT is now collecting the figures to give back statistics to the schools who participated in the project.

The purpose of this research is to investigate the knowledge of the 1st grade High School students relating to the basic concepts of Statistics that are taught in Elementary School in Greece and to determine the effect that teaching through activities has on their performance. This research, which is part of a broader research conducted by the Department of Primary Education of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, was realised at the prefectures of Imathia and Pieria. The research provided useful conclusions, such as that the majority of teachers use traditional approaches in their teaching of Statistics, that students have a fair knowledge of most of Statistics' concepts that are included in the Elementary School Curriculum, that major improvement of this knowledge is observed after a teaching approach through activities and that the performance of students who live in urban areas is better in comparison to the performance of those who live in rural areas.