Preservice Secondary Mathematics Teachers' Statistical Literacy in Understanding of Sample

Abstract

Taking samples of data and using samples to make inferences about unknown populations are at the core of statistical investigations. So, an understanding of the nature of sample as statistical thinking is involved in the area of statistical literacy, since the process of a statistical investigation can turn out to be totally useless if we don't appreciate the part sampling plays. However, the conception of sampling is a scheme of interrelated ideas entailing many statistical notions such as repeatability, representativeness, randomness, variability, and distribution. This complexity makes many people, teachers as well as students, reason about statistical inference relying on their incorrect intuitions without understanding sample comprehensively. Some research investigated how the concept of a sample is understood by not only students but also teachers or preservice teachers, but we want to identify preservice secondary mathematics teachers' understanding of sample as the statistical literacy by a qualitative analysis. We designed four items which asked preservice teachers to write their understanding for sampling tasks including representativeness and variability. Then, we categorized the similar responses and compared these categories with Watson's statistical literacy hierarchy. As a result, many preservice teachers turned out to be lie in the low level of statistical literacy as they ignore contexts and critical thinking, expecially about sampling variability rather than sample representativeness. Moreover, the experience of taking statistics courses in university did not seem to make a contribution to development of their statistical literacy. These findings should be considered when design preservice teacher education program to promote statistics education.