STATISTICAL KNOWLEDGE FOR TEACHING: ELEMENTARY PRESERVICE TEACHERS

A major component of statistical thinking deals with the omnipresence of variability in data. Advances in technology allow for the development of tasks that can engage students more readily in data analysis so that they come to see this variability as early as the elementary grades. Yet how do we help prepare elementary preservice teachers (PSTs) to understand variability in data for themselves and to consider the statistical thinking of children? This paper will share tasks that were designed for a statistics course for elementary PSTs. These tasks make use of several forms of technology such as Tinkerplots® and Interactive Whiteboards (IWBs), and have the intent to develop PSTs’ statistical knowledge for teaching. Preliminary data analysis reveals that these tasks provided PSTs with a conceptual way of appropriately attending to measures of variability in a manner that the knowledge of procedures could not.