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Abstract:

In our talk, we will online some educational research activities within the Linz School of Education related to technology developments and statistics education. Afterwards, we will discuss our work on introducing statistics concepts in schools and how statistics teaching can be connected to sustainable development with real data for students in schools. In particular, we will discuss that statistics is becoming crucial in our current data-driven society to explore numerous phenomena that are too complex to comprehend without exploring and visualising data. Citizens need to understand statistics about issues concerning essential parts of their lives such as the spread of a pandemic or climate change in order to responsibly participate in a prosperous development of our civilization. With our research projects we try to find out more about young students’ intuitive approaches to statistics when visually analysing data. We found that certain kinds of data visualisations are especially capable to provoke reasoning of statistical concepts such as ideas of centre, spread and covariation. Based on these intuitive visual approaches to statistics, another aspect of our design-based research projects is concerned with statistical modelling processes. We developed a learning trajectory where middle school students were engaged in analysing real-world data to explore sustainable development of various countries and to build a model for this phenomenon. Results show that students’ statistical investigative learning processes should feature active participation in constructing knowledge of formal statistical concepts; and students should adopt and fit their intuitive knowledge to formal concepts using methods of visual data analyses. We will outline some diverse opportunities to foster students’ intuitive understanding of statistics and sustainable development issues simultaneously.