This paper is from Session 8F: Research on professional development of teachers in statistics

which comes under Topic 8: Research in statistics education

Professional development for teaching statistics: a collaborative action research project with middle-school mathematics teachers

Presenter

• Leandro de Oliveira Souza (Federal University of Amazonas, Brazil)

Abstract

Teachers need to develop many dimensions of their practice such as statistical knowledge, beliefs about statistics, designing their own lessons and adopting new teaching approaches. We developed a project named Teacher Professional Development Cycle in Statistics (TPDC) which involved sixteen teachers of Mathematics of the elementary school in a process of collaborative action research. The data were collected based on recording videos of meetings and on six questionnaires which were answered by the teachers during the project. The results showed that teachers worked collaboratively overcoming their feelings of insecurities about teaching statistics when an investigative and exploratory approach was used to improve their knowledge and conceptual content. This paper will present our description of how the TPDC project was designed, as well as the advantages in using it in teacher development.