“Maths outside of maths”: Pre-service teachers’ awareness of mathematical and statistical thinking across teachers’ professional work

Abstract

Mathematical and statistical thinking is involved across the breadth of people's home and work life and leisure activities. This paper reports on an aspect of a project that aimed to develop preservice teacher awareness of the mathematical and statistical thinking required across the breadth of primary teachers' professional role. This thinking is conceptualised as the mathematics and statistics embedded in each of the curriculum learning areas, in data literacy, and administration and management tasks. Mentor meetings indicated pre-service teachers who were completing a one-year graduate diploma initially had a limited awareness of the extent of this thinking. Through focus group discussions across the year participating preservice teachers' commentary showed an increased awareness and appreciation of the breadth of contexts where teachers might encounter mathematics and statistics thinking beyond mathematics lessons. Given awareness is fundamental to learning and subsequent action we posit that developing this awareness during teacher education is important.

How Do Pre-/In-Service Mathematics Teachers Reason for or against the Use of Digital Technology in Teaching?

“…Similar to the teaching phases, the issue of not being aware of dT can be assumed for the dT of Organizing-the creation of worksheets and the tracking of grades and other administrative activities of an educator. Pre-service teachers have little to no exposure from their own school experience to the administrative activities of educators [62]. As seen when deciding on the use of dT in a teaching phase, being aware of dT or the use of dT for that purpose requires an understanding of those education obligations, which unless one has been exposed to or has had them explained in the pre-service teacher development process, little knowledge should be expected.…”

Teachers’ Views towards Changes in Curriculum and the Use of Real-Time Big Data in Statistics Education

“…At the international stage, statistics skill has emerged as a skill with high importance for every age, ranging from children in schools to adults. This is since, statistics skills are required in almost every aspect of human activities (Bailey et al, 2020;Ramadhani et al, 2018).…”

“…According to Garfield et al (2015), to develop learning tools in statistics by considering the experts-novices paradigm, it is not necessarily means that a student has to think like an expert, but instead it is enough for the student to have a thinking model based on the experts so that it can be used to form an idea that can help in planning and solving a certain problem. It is hoped that students can be nurtured into a current and future citizen that use statistical thinking to make a better decision (Bailey et al, 2020).…”

“…Data field is continuously evolving, and it is becoming more and more challenging for individuals as well as organizations to interpret. Moreover, almost every current public issue is relying on the use of data (Bailey et al, 2020) that will be presented to the public through a variety of mediums, notably electronics media and then it will be down to the individuals to interpret them. Inaccuracies in interpreting data can potentially affect any planning or decisions that have been made (Baig et al, 2020).…”

“…Hence, statistical skill is essential to improve the public's capability in applying data. Unfortunately, thinking statistically which plays an important role in different aspects of life is still absent in most parties (Bailey et al, 2020). Plus, majority of the society who are not familiar with statistics tend to think that statistics is only involving moderate numerical data and the technic to process this data (Lee, 2015).…”