Linking problems, conclusions and evidence: Primary students' early experiences of planning statistical investigations (original) (raw)
Related papers
Learning and Teaching Statistical Investigations: A Case Study of a Prospective Teacher
More than a collection of tools to deal with problems, statistics provides a comprehensive framework to think about the world. One way of using it is doing statistical investigations (SI). In this communication, we present a case study of a prospective primary school teacher regarding her perspective on teaching and learning SI. To do so, we analyze her written report of a SI, a questionnaire, observation of a SI she carried out in a grade 3 class, and interviews. Results show that this prospective teacher has difficulty in planning a SI for her students, mainly because she sees this activity as a sequence of techniques to be applied. This suggests that in teacher education programs, the analysis of what is involved in teaching statistical concepts through SI must receive specific attention, instead of using SI only as a context to apply concepts and work with data.
Teaching teachers to teach statistical investigations.
Despite its importance for the discipline, the statistical investigation cycle is given little attention in schools. Teachers face unique challenges in teaching statistical inquiry, with elements unfamiliar to many mathematics classrooms: Coping with uncertainty, encouraging debate and competing interpretations, and supporting student collaboration. This chapter highlights ways for teacher educators to support teachers’ learning to teach statistical inquiry. Results of two longitudinal studies are used to formulate recommendations to develop teachers’ proficiency in this area.
Developing primary students' ability to pose questions in statistical investigations
… of the Eighth International Conference on …, 2010
How do children develop their own questions to investigate in statistics? Often in school, teachers just give children questions to respond to, but rarely ask them to generate a question that they want to investigate. To write their own statistical questions, students need to envisage the processes and purpose of a statistical investigation. Curriculum documents in many countries have begun to recognise the benefits and importance of children developing their own questions, however little is known about children's development in this area. This exploratory study aims to understand ways that 9 year old children can more confidently construct relevant and reasonable questions that can be answered with a statistical investigation. Results suggest that by using frameworks and peer negotiation to guide their experiences, students improve their ability to write purposeful investigative questions with richer statistical intent.
Teaching primary teachers to teach statistical inquiry: The uniqueness of initial experiences
8th International Conference on Teaching Statistics ( …, 2011
Experience with statistical inquiry has been advocated in statistics education as vital for learners' understandings of statistical processes. Research has suggested, however, that practices at the school level have focused almost solely on graphs and procedures. While important, these skills do not develop learners' abilities to cope with the decisions that arise in the face of uncertainties and ambiguities that accompany statistical investigations. A longitudinal study in Australia researched experienced primary teachers' evolving experiences in teaching statistical inquiry. This paper will report on the uniqueness of teachers' early experiences in teaching statistical inquiry, an issue that emerged in the first three years of the study. Critical skills that teachers need to develop to teach statistical investigations that are often neglected in teacher professional development are discussed, including implications for research and teacher education.
Students' informal inference when exploring a statistical investigation
HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), 2015
This paper reports on preliminary results of a study aiming to identify informal inference aspects that emerge when grade 8 students explore a statistical investigation using the software TinkerPlots for data handling. Examples from students' work on one task in a sequence, designed to engage students in posing statistical questions about meaningful phenomena, in collecting and representing data and finally in making data-based inferences, illustrate how informal statistical inferences emerge. The results provide suggestions for further research and some educational implications are drawn.
Three paradigms in developing students' statistical reasoning
2016
This article is a reflection on more-than-a-decade research in the area of statistics education in upper primary school (grades 4-6, 10-12 years old). The goal of these studies was to better understand young students' statistical reasoning as they were involved in authentic data investigations and simulations in a technology-enhanced learning environment entitled Connections. The article describes three main paradigms that guided our educational and academic efforts: EDA, ISI, and Modeling. The first, EDA, refers to Exploratory Data Analysis-children investigate sample data they collected without making explicit inferences to a larger population. The second, ISI, refers to Informal Statistical Inference-children make inferences informally about a larger population than the sample they have at hand. The third, Modeling-children use computerized tools to model the phenomenon they study, and simulate many random samples from that model to study statistical ideas. In each of these three paradigms, we provide a short rationale, an example of students' products, and learned lessons. To conclude, current challenges in statistics education are discussed in light of these paradigms. Statistical reasoning Although statistics is now viewed as a unique discipline, statistical content is most often taught worldwide in the mathematics curriculum (K-12) and in departments of mathematics (college level). This has led to exhortations by leading statisticians, such as Moore (1998), about the differences between statistics and mathematics. These arguments challenge statisticians and statistics educators to carefully define the unique characteristics of statistics 13
Examining the Statistical Process Experiences of 8 th Grade Students
This study aims at making 8th grade students go through a statistical process and gain experience in this matter and revealing their behaviors, experiences, and difficulties at each stage of this process. Activities were designed in a way allowing the students to experience a statistical process. Then the students were made to get involved in these activities through group work. Data were collected via statistical process activities, the reflection papers of the students concerning the process, and the videorecordings of classroom discussions. The activities were prepared based on Ben-Zvi and Arcavi (2001) as well as expert opinions. The students posed questions that could be directly answered by the help of relevant texts rather than problems that could be solved through data analysis. The groups formed their tables and charts by focusing on just one feature or variable though the data in the activities involved features of more than one variable. As making an inference by interpreting data requires experience, it is recommended in this study that activities be prepared in a way allowing the use of skills of this sort.
The Journal of Mathematical Behavior, 2002
This paper reports the analysis of performance assessment tasks administered in a seventh-grade classroom. The purpose of the assessments was to obtain data on students' current statistical understandings that would then inform future instructional design decisions in a classroom teaching experiment that focused on statistical data analysis. The tasks were designed to provide information about students' current understandings of creating data, organizing data, and assessing the center and "spreadoutness" of data. In considering the analysis, we found that the students typically viewed the mean as a procedure that was to be used to summarize a group of numbers regardless of the task situation. Data analysis for these students meant "doing something with the numbers." Based on this analysis, a goal that emerged as significant for the classroom teaching experiment was to support a shift in students' reasoning towards data analysis as inquiry rather than procedure. The influence of the students' prior experiences of doing mathematics in school was also apparent when they developed graphs. They were primarily concerned with school-taught graphical conventions rather than with what the graphs signified. In the course of the analysis we distinguished between additive and multiplicative reasoning about data. This distinction is significant given that the transition from additive to multiplicative reasoning constitutes the overriding goal of statistics instruction at the middle-school level.