This paper is from Session 3F: Theory and practice of statistics: curriculum for statistics teachers

which comes under Topic 3: Education and development of staff who teach statistics

Relationships between curriculum knowledge of in-service Mexican teachers and statistics

Presenter

• Ernesto Sánchez (Cinvestav-IPN, Mexico)

Co-author

• Verónica Hoyos (National University of Education, Mexico)

Abstract

Mexican curriculum is a competency-based curriculum; it promotes the use of teaching situations relevant to the students’ life. Such curriculum is more difficult to realize in mathematics education, since it is not easy to find situations that promote the kind of mathematical thinking that should be taught, but it is not the case for statistics education. It is however not clear how to promote the teaching content of statistics to best prepare secondary school teachers to highlight this point. We ask: How do mathematics pre-service teachers understand the connection between competencies and statistics? Thus a questionnaire to evaluate the pre-service teachers’ knowledge about the relationships between statistics and competency-based curriculum is proposed. The teachers’ knowledge of such relationships is analyzed through the responses to 7 questions from 12 in-service teachers. The results show evidences on what in-service teachers know and what they keep hidden with respect to those relationships.