One primary goal of TEACH-STAT (a three-year project funded by the National Science Foundation) is to help elementary school teachers in North Carolina learn how to teach data analysis and interpretation more effectively, that is, learn the pedagogy of statistics. In Spring 1992, the first cohort of 55, K-6 teachers completed a baseline survey of their knowledge of statistics pedagogy; these teachers then participated in a three-week workshop in summer 1992. At the outset, teachers seemed to (a) have limited views of what should be taught in order for students to understand data interpretation, (b) emphasize isolated bits of knowledge, mainly about graphing, and (c) have little knowledge of pedagogy for important ideas. At the conclusion of the workshop, teachers' views of statistics seemed to have shifted more toward a holistic view of statistics content, with accompanying increases in knowledge of particular pedagogical strategies to address the components of statistics understanding.
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