The inclusion of statistics and probability in the mathematics curriculum has always generated challenges to mathematics teachers of elementary schools. This article discusses activities that promote the professional development of such teachers. We present part of a doctoral research study of 16 teachers in which we discuss two case studies of…

This article focuses on the notion of literacy--general and statistical--in the analysis of data from a fieldwork research project carried out as part of a master's degree that investigated the teaching and learning of statistics in adult education mathematics classes. We describe the statistical context of the project that involved the…

This paper is based on research that investigated the development of probabilistic language and thinking by students 10-12 years old. The focus was on the adequate use of probabilistic terms in social practice. A series of tasks was developed for the investigation and completed by the students working in groups. The discussions were video recorded…

This study investigates the relationship between deterministic and probabilistic reasoning when students experiment on a real-world situation involving uncertainty. Twelve students, aged eight to nine years, participated in an outdoor teaching activity that called for reflection on the growth of sunflowers within the frame of a sunflower lottery,…

Teachers' attitudes towards statistics can have a significant effect on their own statistical training, their teaching of statistics, and the future attitudes of their students. The influence of attitudes in teaching statistics in different contexts was previously studied in the work of Estrada et al. (2004, 2010a, 2010b) and Martins et al.…

This study investigated elementary school teachers' comprehension of data displays. Assessment, interview, and observation data were analyzed to determine their level of comprehension. Results revealed that the teachers were proficient at "reading the data" and computation types of "reading between the data" questions, but were unsuccessful with…

There is growing recognition of the importance of developing young students' informal inferential reasoning (IIR). This focus on informal inference in school statistics has implications for teacher education. This study reports on 26 preservice teachers utilizing Lesson Study to support a focus on the teaching of IIR in primary classrooms.…

Informal inferential reasoning has shown some promise in developing students' deeper understanding of statistical processes. This paper presents a framework to think about three key principles of informal inference--generalizations "beyond the data," probabilistic language, and data as evidence. The authors use primary school classroom episodes…

This paper focuses on developing students' informal inference skills, reporting on how a group of third grade students formulated and evaluated data-based inferences using the dynamic statistics data-visualization environment TinkerPlots[TM] (Konold & Miller, 2005), software specifically designed to meet the learning needs of students in the early…

In this reflective paper, we explore students' local and global thinking about informal statistical inference through our observations of 10- to 11-year-olds, challenged to infer the unknown configuration of a virtual die, but able to use the die to generate as much data as they felt necessary. We report how they tended to focus on local changes…