Preservice Secondary Mathematics Teachers’ Statistical Knowledge: A Snapshot of Strengths and Weaknesses

Amid the implementation of new curriculum standard regarding statistics and new recommendations for preservice secondary mathematics teachers (PSMTs) to teach statistics, there is a need to examine the current state of PSMTs’ knowledge of the statistical content they will be expected to teach. This...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Jennifer N. Lovett, Hollylynne S. Lee
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Taylor & Francis Group 2018-09-01
Series:Journal of Statistics Education
Subjects:
Online Access:http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10691898.2018.1496806
Description
Summary:Amid the implementation of new curriculum standard regarding statistics and new recommendations for preservice secondary mathematics teachers (PSMTs) to teach statistics, there is a need to examine the current state of PSMTs’ knowledge of the statistical content they will be expected to teach. This study reports on the statistical knowledge of 217 PSMTs from a purposeful sample of 18 universities across the United States. The results show that PSMTs may not have strong Common Statistical Knowledge that is needed to teach statistics to high school students. PSMTs’ strengths include identifying appropriate measures of center, while weaknesses involve issues with variability, sampling distributions, p-values, and confidence intervals.
ISSN:1069-1898