Difficulties in learning statistics: An experiment with young children

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Difficulties in learning statistics: An experiment with young children

Susana Colaço

To cite this version:

Susana Colaço. Difficulties in learning statistics: An experiment with young children. CERME 9 -

Ninth Congress of the European Society for Research in Mathematics Education, Charles University in

Prague, Faculty of Education; ERME, Feb 2015, Prague, Czech Republic. pp.775-776. �hal-01287135�

775 CERME9 (2015) – TWG05

Difficulties in learning statistics: An experiment with young children

Susana Colaço

Escola Superior de Educação do Instituto Politécnico de Santarém, Santarém

Universidade de Lisboa, Centro de Investigação Operacional, Lisboa, Portugal, susana.colaco@ese.ipsantarem.pt

The poster presents the main difficulties of 2nd grade students in an experiment which involves tasks of col- lecting, organization and analysis of data. The results show that the main difficulties of these students are related to representing the data using charts and their interpretation. Using real contexts may facilitate the interpretation of data but may provide the existence of misinterpretations, derived from the students’ own experience.

Keywords: Statistics, learning, first grades, charts.

LEARNING STATISTICS IN THE FIRST GRADES The teaching of statistics in the early years must take into account that the collection of data should be mean- ingful to the children and a set of decisions must be taken, by the children, to represent the data and to be able to interpret it (Pereira-Mendoza, 1986). Gil & Ben- Zvi (2011) claim that knowing and understanding the real contexts of a statistical task plays an important role in students’ performance. Also, Langrall, Nisbet,

& Mooney (2006) say that this knowledge is impor- tant to engage students in statistical tasks. The same authors, on the other hand, report that in some situ- ations conflicts exist between the knowledge about the real context and statistical data.

Several studies investigated difficulties in graphing and interpreting graphs. Curcio (1987) presented three levels of students’ comprehension, namely, read- ing the data, reading between the data and reading beyond the data. Additionally Friel, Curcio, & Bright (2001) identify critical factors that appear to influence the graphs comprehension. Moreover, these authors mentioned the importance of context in graph com- prehension.

METHOD

This poster presents one experiment of collecting, organization and analysis of data performed in a 2

grade class. The goal was to understand what were the main difficulties of the students during this experi- ment, from the initial question: Will we weigh more than last year? And understand to what extent the real context may or may not be a facilitator in this process.

The main instruments of data collection consisted of two lessons that involved Collecting, Organizing and Data Analysis (CODA), observation, video recording and documents produced by students.

RESULTS

The experiment, began with the contextualization of the initial question. It was the first time that these students worked with CODA. Several difficulties were identified in these experiments: 1) data collection: re- cording of current weight rounded to one decimal place; confusion on how to register the data when faced with more than one answer; 2) data organiza- tion: were unable to choose a proper scale for the bar graph; 3) data analysis: when discussing the data represented several questions arose – confusion re- garding the number of answers when compared with the number of participants.

DISCUSSION

It was found that using a real context with which the

participants identified and sometimes resorting to

their own experience ended up making the formula-

tion of the problem and the planning of data collection

easy to understand. On the other hand, misinterpre-

tations were introduced due to the real context/expe-

riences that were not explicit in the data, for example

Difficulties in learning statistics: An experiment with young children (Susana Colaço)

776 confusion between height and weight. These “con-

flicts” between the data and real context are similar to what is described in Langrall and colleagues (2006) and Ben-Zvi, Aridor, Makar and Bakker (2012).

REFERENCES

Ben-Zvi, D., Aridor, K., Makar, K., & Bakker, A. (2012). Students’

emergent articulations of uncertainty while making infor- mal statistical inferences. ZDM – The International Journal on Mathematics Education, 44(7), 913–925.

Curcio, F. (1987). Comprehension of mathematical relationships expressed in graphs. Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, 18(5), 382–393.

Friel, S. N., Curcio, F., & Bright, G. W., (2001). Making sense of graphs: critical factors influencing comprehension and instructional implications. Journal for Research in mathe- matics Education, 32(2), 124–158.

Gil E., & Ben-Zvi D. (2011). Explanations and context in the emergence of students’ informal inferential reasoning, Mathematical Thinking and Learning, 13(1–2), 87–108.

Langrall, C., Nisbet, S., & Mooney, E. (2006). The interplay be- tween students’ statistical knowledge and context knowl- edge in analyzing data. In A. Rossman & B. Chance (Eds.), Working cooperatively in statistics education: Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Teaching Statistics – ICOTS7 (pp. 5-6). Salvador, Brazil.

Pereira–Mendoza, L. (1986). The Teaching of Statistics to 6–11 years old in Britain, Canada and the USA. In Proceedings of the Second Conference on Teaching Statistics (pp. 44–45).

Victoria BC.