One important part of statistical education is the training of teachers. It would seem to the author that while most teacher education programmes for primary teachers include mathematics education courses, they do not specifically address statistical education. In addition, teachers who enter these programmes would have taken mathematics in school and possibly at post-secondary institutions, but their exposure to statistics would have been limited. Since statistical thinking is different from other forms of thinking, the situation seems to have implications for teacher training. Reasoning under uncertainty is a different way of looking at the world. An accountant may be very good at what he or she does, but the author, for one, would not like an accountant to perform surgery. This paper will raise some questions associated with statistical knowledge as it applies to primary teachers.
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