The objectives of this research were to determine if there were patterns to elementary teachers' development of statistical ideas. Center of the data and typical of the data were the two concepts studied. Comparisons of teacher's responses before and after instruction were made to determine areas of fixation and ideas about measures of center. Before instruction teachers tended to fixate on large graphical features. After instruction teachers focused on measures of center, particularly the median, to explain their ideas of center, rather than graphical features. More teachers focused on data intervals after instruction to explain typical in the histogram, but these ideas were not stable over the two graphs. We conjecture that fixations and stability are two factors in determining the statistical conceptual development of elementary teachers.
The CAUSE Research Group is supported in part by a member initiative grant from the American Statistical Association’s Section on Statistics and Data Science Education