Comparing Technology-supported Teacher Education Curricular Models for Enhancing Statistical Content Knowledge

Abstract

Recent calls have been made to enhance and extend the statistical experiences of K-12 students. However, to ensure that such goals are met, teachers also need to develop deep conceptual understanding and pedagogical content knowledge that are essential to statistical thinking and reasoning. In this regard, over the past two decades, leading thinkers and professional organizations had advocated that teaching and curricula should be focused and organized around problem solving. In this paper we describe three such technology-supported curricula-a project-based learning (PjBL) unit, problem-solving activities (PS) unit, and a model-eliciting activities (MEA) unit-that align with this perspective and discuss the ways in which they supported pre-service teachers' engagement with elementary statistics concepts and technology. Our findings target two specific gaps in the literature-research on the use of technology in the development of statistical literacy and providing empirical support for advancing teachers' statistical knowledge through engagement in the statistical investigation cycle.

Enhancing Preservice Teachers’ Key Competencies for Promoting Sustainability in a University Statistics Course

“…Several researchers, from their qualitative examination, suggested the importance of real-world-based activities for prospective teachers [14,15]. Francis et al [13] reaffirmed this point with their quantitative investigation showing prospective teachers' growth in statistical thinking after engaging in project-based learning experiences incorporating statistical investigation. They showed that the preservice teachers who engaged in technology-aided complex problem-solving tasks showed improvement at the posttests.…”

“…Building statistical thinking ability requires experience with statistical investigations grounded in real-world contexts [43]. Therefore, it is important for prospective teachers to become engaged in projects with statistical investigation in teacher education programs [13][14][15]41,44]. To be competent in statistical thinking goes well beyond procedural mathematical knowledge.…”

“…Reflecting on this limitation, current researchers choose an alternative approach to teach statistics. This provides an opportunity to engage in statistical investigation across the entire process, including data collection, analysis, and interpretation [13][14][15]. The courses incorporating statistical investigation allow students to consider real-time data.…”

Students’ Perceptions of and Responses to Teaching Assistant and Peer Feedback

“…MEAs fulfill all five of these essential aspects. Cross Francis, Hudson, Vesperman, and Perez (2014) explain that MEAs, project-based learning, and problem solving activities have many pedagogical commonalities, but have differing process details and products.…”

“…+/-0.7 min.). Student teams' exploratory analysis of the data should help them understand the need to account for distribution of the data rather than just mean and/or standard deviation when developing their mathematical models (Carnes, Cardella, & Diefes-Dux, 2010;Carnes, Diefes-Dux, & Cardella, 2011). Hanoglu, Horvath, and Diefes-Dux (2014) provide a detailed account of one team's iterative solution to this MEA.…”