Developing new theoretical tools in statistics education research


Book: 
53 International Statistical Institute (ISI) session, Seoul, Korea
Authors: 
Batanero, C. & Godino, J. D.
Category: 
Year: 
2001
Abstract: 

According to Vygotsky (1934), the meaning of words are the main units to analyse psychological activity, since words relfect the union of thought and language, and include the properties of the concept to which they refer. As such, one main goal in statistics education research is finding out what meanings students assign to statistical concepts, symbols and representations and explaining how these meanings are constructed during problem solving activities and how they evolve as a consquence of instruction to progressively adapt to the meanings we are trying to help students construct.<br><br>In trying to develop a systematic research program for mathematics and statistics education at the University of Granada, Spain we have developed a theoretical model to carry out these analysie (Godino &amp; Batanero, 1994; 1998), which has been successfully applied in defferent research work in statistics education., in particular in some PhD these carried out at different Universities in Spain. The aim of this paper is to describe this model and suggest a research agenda for statistics education based on the same.

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