Abstract:

There are no formally published details of the extent to which UK teacher training courses embed training in teaching statistics in preparation for school teaching. However there is much anecdotal evidence that statistics has a low priority in the content and delivery of many mathematics teacher training courses and is rarely delivered well, although currently statistics forms a key part of the mathematics national curriculum at both primary and secondary stages.
Statistics is a pervasive subject that occurs not only in the mathematics curriculum, but in several other school subjects. Whilst all these routes for learning statistics are important, the Royal Statistical Society (RSS) concluded, in response to the Government- initiated Mathematics Enquiry (2004) into the teaching of mathematics, that the teaching of statistics per se should be contained within the school mathematics curriculum. Further, the RSS Centre for Statistical Education advocated that statistics should be taught through a problem-solving approach.
One recommendation from the Mathematics Enquiry was to reform and strengthen aspects of teacher training and professional development, which is the focus of the current work on statistics teaching in schools. If there is to be improvement into the way in which the subject is taught in schools then statistics educators need to influence the content and delivery of the statistics curriculum in teacher training courses.
This is not solely a UK concern – for example the Joint International Congress for Mathematics Education/International Association for Statistical Education Conference in 2008 had as its theme “Statistics Education in School Mathematics: Challenges for Teaching and Teacher Education”. Further, the school level Guidelines for Assessment and Instruction in Statistics Education (GAISE) report (Franklin et al, 2005) from the US concurs with many of the conclusions with regard to statistical literacy and the problem solving approach noted above.
Here we report on the findings of an investigation into the statistics content and delivery in UK teacher training courses. In the first instance the main focus of this research is on courses for secondary mathematics teaching. We report here results from a survey of student teachers in mathematics on their attitudes, background and understanding of statistics and how they expect to develop the skills to teach it.
This study is funded by the Teaching Statistics Trust, which sees the results as contributing to the underpinning of the RSS 10 year getstats campaign.

Keywords:

Statistics, teacher-training, curriculum.