Abstract:

The crisis generated by the COVID-19 highlighted the need for citizens to understand and critically evaluate statistical information and thus make informed decisions in uncertainty contexts.
Usually, the media employ different representation to communicate information; however, their comprehension is a sophisticated skill that requires education. In this sense, statistical tables are widely used to transmit and communicate information in different contexts, due to their cognitive flexibility. Therefore, the ability to read, interpret and build statistical tables should be a component of the statistical literacy for all citizen.
The curriculum guidelines of several countries, such as Spain, include statistical tables along the primary and secondary education as an element in the development of stochastic sense. Furthermore, textbooks are a highly relevant resource reflecting what is proposed in the curriculum guidelines. Additionally, textbooks are frequently used in the classroom, providing learning opportunities for students and supporting the teacher in making decisions about the instructional process. Thus, an analysis of the textbook lessons on a given subject provides information about how the teaching of that subject is conceived in the classroom.
This paper focuses on analyzing problem situations related to statistical tables in a sample of 18 Spanish textbooks for Secondary Education from three different publishers. We take the idea of problem field from the Onto-semiotic Approach to Mathematical Knowledge and Instruction (OSA). This approach conceives that mathematical objects arise from the practices of solving problem fields. It is important to study the problem situations presented in textbooks because they promote and contextualise mathematical activity, together with the actions, which constitute the practical component of mathematics.
The research is descriptive, and the following problem areas were identified through content analysis: SP1) Data recording, as a first step in a statistical study; SP2) Building a table with the distribution of a statistical variable; SP3) Translation between data representations, which may be from table to graph and vice versa, from table to table, from text to table, or from table to summary statistics and vice versa; and SP4) Cross-classification of two variables, identifying the organization of bivariate data, and the study of the association between variables.
The problem situation that appears most frequently in the textbooks is the translation between representations (SP3), most usually the translation from a statistical table, followed by the translation from graph to table or vice versa. Situations linked to the building and study of the two-way table (SP4) are scarce, disregarding the curricular guidelines and their importance in the study of probability and regression analysis. The problem situations that give meaning to the study of statistical tables is a subject that has been scarcely researched. Its description provides information on the diverse cognitive aspects involved in its study, which may be of interest to teachers for teaching this subject in the classroom.

Keywords:

Statistical tables, Secondary Education, Textbooks.