By Sheri E. Johnson, University of Georgia
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Educators certainly want their students to gain mathematical and statistical understanding, which Sierpinska & Kilpatrick (1998) characterized as “interconnected knowledge”. Traditionally, the teaching of probability and statistics has been reserved for college students, but that is beginning to change as evidenced by the adoption of the common core, where over 20% of the mathematics curriculum is devoted to data analysis and statistics (Ususkin, 2016). In efforts to better prepare future middle grades teachers, course material for a combined content and pedagogy geometry and measurement course at a large public university in the southeast has been created and modified to integrate statistics concepts. Some examples used in this course include how measurement is inherently a statistical question, an activity relating circle diameters to circumference through measurement while simultaneously recognizing variance and finally, visual displays that use geometric area to represent relationships of categorical data and (in)dependence.