Abstract:

Statistical literacy is inevitable for conscious citizenship and adjusting to the fast-developing world. Students should be able to represent and analyze data in statistical literacy before graduating from middle school (Ministry of National Education, 2018). Therefore, the study aims to investigate the eighth-grade students’ statistical literacy levels in terms of representing and analyzing the data component of the statistical process with a contextual task about Covid-19. The design of the study is qualitative research. The data were collected from 248 eight grade students in different regions of Turkey, including Ankara, Kars, Kayseri, and Istanbul, with convenience sampling. The data were collected through a qualitative survey. The open-ended survey consisted of a contextual task and four open-ended questions related to the Covid-19 pandemic. The questions were prepared by considering the national curriculum objectives of the Turkish mathematics curriculum (2018) and the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics standards. Data were analyzed with the four-stage framework of Sharma et al. (2011). Since relational thinking is first expected in level 3, the levels are categorized such that the first two are in the low statistical literacy category, and the last two are in the high statistical literacy category. The results show that 98.39% of the students in Turkey have low statistical literacy. While there are no students in Ankara and Kars at a high statistical literacy level, 2% of the students in İstanbul and Kars are at a high statistical literacy level.

Keywords:

Statistical Literacy, Representation and Analysis of the Data, Contextual Task.