STATISTICS IN SECONDARY EDUCATION. THE NEED FOR ITS GREATER PRESENCE IN MATHEMATICS SYLLABUS DESIGN

The starting point of this paper is the contrast between the value of Statistics in present day society, listing some of its most recent applications, and the comparatively little time spent in teaching Probability and Statistics in Secondary School: Certainly the Media are full of Statistics, nevertheless it is not here where they are used as rigorously as they should be, and the wrong figures often published in newspapers and magazines have had as a consequence a bad reputation for this area of mathematics, causing skepticism among our students and a lack of interest in learning it.
Therefore we propose other motivations to learn Statistics, which the teacher may develop more or less deeply according to the interest showed by students: Statistics for Economics and Politics; Statistics related to Medicine and Genetics; Statistics oriented to Market Research, or even statistical studies applied to the world of sports.
After that, some of the reasons, which cause the lack of attention given to this area of mathematics in the teaching practice are analyzed, as well as the problems that the students find to assimilate these concepts:

• Statistics are difficult to learn, they involve a change of thinking within mathematical reasoning, going from deterministic situations which were hither to more common in math class to situations where we can only use statistical models.
• Statistics are difficult to explain too: there has been a shift in the curriculum for this area of maths, trying to apply a more experimental methodology and an approach to probability based on relative frequency, avoiding combinatorial techniques when calculating probabilities.
Finally some suggestions are put forward to improve the teaching of Probability and Statistics in Secondary School, and some easy class activities are proposed to practically help our students understand mathematical objects that appear when situations involving probabilities are modeled.