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ERIC Number: EJ1233826
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2019-Dec
Pages: 23
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-1386-4416
EISSN: N/A
Pre-Service Primary School Teachers' Knowledge of Informal Statistical Inference
de Vetten, Arjen; Schoonenboom, Judith; Keijzer, Ronald; van Oers, Bert
Journal of Mathematics Teacher Education, v22 n6 p639-661 Dec 2019
The ability to reason inferentially is increasingly important in today's society. It is hypothesized here that engaging primary school students in informal statistical reasoning (ISI), defined as making generalizations without the use of formal statistical tests, will help them acquire the foundations for inferential and statistical thinking. Teachers who engage students in ISI need to have good content knowledge of ISI (ISI-CK). However, little is known about the ISI-CK of primary education pre-service teachers. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to describe this knowledge by surveying 722 first-year pre-service teachers from seven teacher colleges across the Netherlands. The survey consisted of five tasks using open-ended questions and true/false statements. The descriptive analysis showed that most respondents understood that descriptive statistics that take the global shape of the distribution into account can be used as arguments within ISI. Although a majority agreed that random sampling is a valid sampling method, distributed sampling was the preferred strategy for selecting a sample. Moreover, when asked to make a generalization beyond the data, most pre-service teachers only described the data and did not appear to understand that a representative sample can be used to make inferences about a population. These findings suggest that it may be useful if statistics education for pre-service teachers places more emphasis on sampling and inference, thereby prompting pre-service teachers to engage in ISI.
Springer. Available from: Springer Nature. 233 Spring Street, New York, NY 10013. Tel: 800-777-4643; Tel: 212-460-1500; Fax: 212-348-4505; e-mail: customerservice@springernature.com; Web site: https://link.springer.com/
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: Higher Education; Postsecondary Education; Elementary Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: Netherlands
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A