Teacher educators have a concern about the level of mathematical (including statistical) content knowledge of students who enter teacher education programs. Many students have knowledge of certain statistical procedures but lack a real understanding of those procedures such as why and when some should be used in preference to others. This paper reports on a study into the statistical knowledge of primary (elementary) teacher education students. An open-ended task (using a small multi-variate data set) was given to the students and required them to examine and report any interesting features in the data. Aspects of the students' level of 'data sense' was evaluated through an investigation of the statistical procedures that they used in relation to the report which they produced on what the data showed.
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