Working Group Report on Statistics Curriculum: Content and Framing

Abstract

Teachers and curriculum developers working at all levels are concerned with the content of courses, which has usually been described in terms of what students should know. Traditionally this has been listed in terms of factual and conceptual knowledge, and operational knowledge and procedural skills. More recently, some statistics (and mathematics) curricula have been structured in terms of both knowing and doing, with the emphasis on doing being related to holistic approaches and large-scale issues. Within this emphasis, what students “do ” might be thought of in terms of problem solving (doing statistical investigations and statistical modelling), reasoning with uncertainty, communicating, and making connections. We believe that there are other important perspectives that can be used to consider the statistics curriculum. The first of these is statistical thinking; what is known and done is only meaningful if underpinned by thinking; this includes thinking about data, investigations and modelling, variation, multiple representations, sampling, inference, and so on. For teachers a key concern is learning activities. What range of learning activities help students develop their ability to know, do and think statistically? We acknowledge that a curriculum may be written using a framework involving only one or two of these perspectives, but all four of them need to be considered and, ideally, all four will be made explicit either