Topic 11

Teaching Statistics to Special Needs Students

Convenors

• Pedro Campos (Portugal)
• Ingrith Alvarez Alfonso (Colombia)
• Dicleny Castro (Colombia)

Abstract

The challenge of teaching students with special needs is not new. But nowadays, due to the enormous technological advances, as well as the amount of data available in classroom for statistical analysis, it is crucial to develop new ways to explore this data and to guarantee equity and inclusiveness in education, especially in the teaching of Statistics and Data Science.

In this topic, we invite participants to submit papers that consider the challenges in teaching statistics for students with special needs, including learning problems, as well as physical, intellectual, cognitive limitations, but also students with exceptional abilities, with high mathematical talents, and gifted intellectually.

It is important to emphasize that this topic considers not only the challenges in teaching caused by students’ individual difficulties, but also the exceptional situations associated with their social, cultural and economic conditions. In this topic we also include the situations of schools with limited resources that promote an inclusive teaching of statistics. Situations of groups of refugees, migrants and gender (or disabilities) teaching separation are also addressed.

Submissions may be based on these ideas and fall under the following subtopics:

• Challenges in teaching statistics for students with special needs, including students with exceptional abilities;
• Impact of Social, cultural and economic conditions on the teaching of Statistics
• Inclusive education using Data Science and Machine Learning approaches;
• New ways for teaching statistics in developing countries: visualizing data with graphs and infographics;
• Less developed countries: how to teach with digital resources?
• Using computers to enhance learning in handicapped students’ academic performance.