Project Overview
This 40-month project aims to investigate two highly related
areas. They are: (1) What high school students learn and the difficulties
they have as they participate in sustained, quantitatively-oriented,
scheme-based instruction in probabilistic and statistical reasoning;
(2) How we might effectively engage teachers so they can teach
for students' abilities to reason stochastically.
The project will have two overlapping phases. The first will focus
on college-bound humanities-oriented high school students' participation
in a semester-long course on probability and statistics using
specially-designed activities and instruction, and on describing
aspects of instructional actions and interactions which might
be key to what they learned. The second phase will use products
and insights from the first phase to engage a group of high school
Algebra II teachers in rethinking what they hope students learn
from statistics instruction and in reflecting on ways variations
in their instruction can variously affect students' learning.
The site of the second phase will be a three-week workshop, with
follow-up visits, for 10 Algebra II teachers. The workshop's ostensive
aim will be that they design instructional activities and materials
to use in teaching probability or statistics in their regular
Algebra II classes. The workshop and follow-up's research aim
will be to provide occasions for teachers to grapple with issues
of their personal understandings of probability/statistics and
of mathematics teaching and learning that are central to their
instruction, all so that they may be analyzed and understood.
Data will be collected from a number of sources, including videotaped
instruction, individual interviews with students and teachers,
students' and teachers' written work, draft and final documents
from the workshop, and videotaped discussions of issues surrounding
the documents. Student data will be analyzed in terms of the mental
actions, operations and schemes and concomitant imagery that might
be expressed in their visible actions ("the sense they make
of instruction"). Teacher data will be analyzed similarly,
but with added attention to institutional and self-imposed constraints
under which they may feel compelled to operate, and with special
attention given to changes in their conceptions of aims, objectives,
and content.
See online artifacts of current teaching experiment at http://pat-thompson.net/BHStat/