This paper is from Session 2G: Linking research and practice in teaching and learning statistics at the school level

which comes under Topic 2: Statistics education at school level

From observing and evaluating variation to measuring and comparing variation

Presenter

• Erna Lampen (University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa)

Abstract

Teachers are tasked with engaging students’ everyday reasoning in order to develop statistical reasoning, but there is little guidance for statistics teachers to understand relevant patterns in everyday reasoning about data contexts. In this paper I report a discursive analysis of a discussion of the data context of prices of used cars by a group of teachers in an introductory statistics course. Everyday reasoning and informal statistical reasoning are proposed as points on a continuum along the development of statistical reasoning, and defined in terms of discursive patterns. I describe patterns in everyday discourse about data contexts and illustrate how such patterns influence reasoning about context in a classroom discussion. Analysis of the participants’ word use indicates that everyday terms like “value” and “price” should not be treated as synonyms in discussions of data contexts, even if they refer to the same numerical data.