IMPROVING SKILLS TO TEACH STATISTICS IN SECONDARY SCHOOL THROUGH ACTIVITY-BASED WORKSHOPS

Abstract

Though statistics is covered in secondary-school curricula, it is usually limited to few lessons and mainly taught in a procedural approach. There seems to be a gap between the education of mathematics teachers and the demands on their practice. Learning statistics from a mathematical perspective does not qualify to teach the subject properly. Therefore, we developed a pedagogical intervention that consists in a training program for teaching aimed at mathematics pre-service teachers and focused on activity-based learning. Two workshops and a web-site were designed: first, to improve competencies in teaching statistics at secondary level, and second, to positively influence attitudes towards statistics. Workshops about descriptive statistics and probability were focused on real-data analysis from media, games, and simulations. Over several years, more than 500 teachers attended these workshops, which were positively evaluated in terms of content, relevance, and applicability. A follow-up survey 2–5 years later showed that most teachers are teaching statistics in their classes, which can be seen as great step forward to bring statistics into the classroom.

First published February 2020 at Statistics Education Research Journal Archives