This paper is from Session 2E: Improving the teaching of statistics at school level
which comes under Topic 2: Statistics education at the school level
(Friday 16th, 14:00-16:00)
Teachers’ understanding of students’ conceptions about chance: an expert-novice contrast
Presenter
Abstract
This exploratory study investigated teachers’ perception of students’ thinking about chance. In particular, the study explored how teachers anticipated and explained students’ difficulties with the idea of chance, and the strategies teachers claimed to use to help students reorganize their thinking. Two teachers, one expert and one novice, members of an AP Statistics learning community, participated in this study. They were observed in the learning community meetings, and interviewed in depth. The interviews explored four core ideas in statistics that have been associated with the source of students’ difficulties about chance: sample space, randomness, independence, and the law of large numbers. The results of this study highlighted that the expert and novice teachers exhibited differences in the way they perceived students’ difficulties and in the way they dealt with them.
