Preface to 'Teaching Statistics in School Mathematics - Challenges for Teaching and Teacher Education. A Joint ICMI/IASE Study: The 18th ICMI Study'

Abstract

The teaching of statistics in secondary school has a long tradition in countries like France, Spain and the United Kingdom. However, because statistics is becoming increasingly important in modern society, the relevance of developing statistical thinking in students across all levels of education has grown. Consequently, the new curricula published in the past years in many countries like Brazil, Costa Rica, South Africa, Spain, the United Arab Emirates and the United States of America include statistics from the first year of primary school level (6 year-old children). Changes in what is expected in the teaching of statistics do not just concern the amount but also the quality of the content. Until recently, statistics in many school curricula was reduced to tasks in which learners were given small organised data sets and were asked to produce specific graphs, compute simple statistics (e.g., the mean or median) or answer simple direct questions. This formula-based approach to statistics resulted in students who were ill-prepared for tertiary level statistics and adults who were statistically illiterate. The current recommendations, even for primary school levels, suggest a data-orientated approach to the teaching of statistics where students are expected to: design investigations; formulate research questions; collect data using observations, surveys, and experiments; describe and compare data sets; and propose and justify conclusions and predictions based on data. Learners are expected to deal with data in significant contexts and to take a critical stance on the analysis and interpretation of data and especially the abuse of data and statistics. The importance of developing statistical thinking and reasoning and not just statistical knowledge in students is being emphasised in many curricula.