Teaching Statistics for Sustainability across Contexts: Exploring the Knowledge and Beliefs of Teachers

Abstract

We explore the effect of the design of intentional teaching sequences from the concrete to the abstract in order to promote the teaching of statistics in connection with sustainability. To this end, the pre-validated questionnaires “MTSK-Stochastic Statistics” and “ESD in Statistics Activities” are administered to in-service primary education teachers. Both tools contain the same statistics teaching itinerary, based on the mathematics teaching itineraries approach, that includes five tasks: a real situation, a manipulative, a game, a technological resource, and a graphic resource. Each task includes an overview, objectives, content, required materials, development, and development questions; in addition, the second questionnaire includes connections to sustainability. The results show that tasks with real contexts, manipulative resources, and technological resources are the ones with the lowest scores. These initial findings lead us to conclude that teachers mobilize their knowledge to teach statistics as it relates to sustainability in different ways, depending on the type of task.