In Italy the knowledge both of the environments in which the teachers work and of their attitudes towards the teaching of mathematics in general and of probability and statistics in particular, is in extremely short supply. The survey of which the broad outlines are presented here aims to fill this gap. The intention is to provide material for policies of reform for the school levels considered. The outstanding result is in the way it brings out the great differences, not only in basic knowledge and training of teachers, but also in their attitude towards the teaching of mathematics and in particular probability and statistics. This makes it particularly difficult to propose a standard syllabus for the subjects previously mentioned at the Upper Secondary School level., and yet this tendency of policy-makers, at least for the first to be reformed. It is quite clear that serious problems that arise at the level of teacher retraining derive from this.
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