This is a session of Topic 3: Education and development of staff who teach statistics

Theory and practice of statistics: curriculum for statistics teachers

Organizers

• Pedro Arteaga (Spain) : Session chair
• Carmen Batanero (Spain)

Abstract

The teaching of statistics is recently included since the primary school levels in an increasing number of countries. These curricular innovations have created the need to improve the education of teachers to teach statistics; a main conclusion from the Joint Study organized by the IASE and the ICMI in 2008.

The education of teachers is an important area of research in statistics education, given the complexity of knowledge and competence required by the teacher. Although teachers do not need high levels of statistical knowledge, they do require a profound understanding of the basic statistics they teach at school level, including a deep grasp of the interconnections among different aspects of this knowledge. In addition, teachers need good attitudes towards and correct beliefs about statistics, and a good professional knowledge for teaching.

This professional knowledge includes: general pedagogical knowledge and pedagogical statistical knowledge, curriculum knowledge; knowledge of learners and their characteristics; knowledge of educational contexts aims, purposes, and values. As the time available for preparing the teachers is scarce, a main challenge for teacher educators is to find suitable ways to articulate the teachers’ learning of statistics and the related pedagogical knowledge, and, at the same time, to transmit a sound epistemological vision of statistics. Since students build their knowledge in an active way, by solving problems and interacting with their classmates, we should use this same approach in training the teachers, especially if we want them to use a constructivist and social approach in their teaching.

The aim of this session is presenting and analysing examples of successful curricula or research experiences directed to prepare primary and secondary school teachers to teach statistics that hopefully can be generalized to other settings.

Papers