The Teaching and Learning of Statistics

This book arrived shrouded in mystery. The editor described it as “proceedings” but nothing on the exterior nor in the front matter confirmed this. Near the end of the first chapter we learn that the volume is one outcome of the Twelfth International Conference on Mathematics Education held in Seoul in 2012. But these are not the proceedings of that meeting. Associated with that meeting was a gathering of a Topic Study Group on the Teaching and Learning of Statistics. And finally we learn these are 38 contributed papers from that group.

As might be expected of contributed papers, there is great variability in quality. A number of contributions are just one or two paragraphs long and so vague they offer little more than shouting “present” when the roll is called. The book makes a point of offering an international perspective, and we immediately see that in addition to the meeting having taken place in Korea, the editors are from Israel and Australia, and the publisher from Switzerland. The editors write English well but that cannot be said of all the contributors.

There is considerable variability in whom the authors are addressing, with some articles accessible to a general reader, but some requiring intimate knowledge of the statistics education research community. In addition, multiple chapters have researchers checking students’ misconceptions about statistics, but in too many cases what they are actually checking is whether the students have the same misconceptions as the researcher. Finally there are production problems with graphs that appear to have been done in color but printed in black-and-white, so that the red, blue, and green lines are all the same shade of grey, and we cannot tell which line goes with which group. Sadly, most of the contributions published here should not have been.

But not all. The most interesting papers are ones that give detailed accounts of interviews with students that let the students express their own understandings of statistics. As Jean Piaget learned many decades ago, what students say can be both surprising and valuable. A case in point looks at how critical thinking skills and statistical thinking skills compete in students’ minds (pp.83–94). If it seems odd that there should be such a conflict, one aspect of it involves students being “skeptical” even in the face of strong statistical evidence.

This volume has so many problems that it is hard to imagine many MAA members wanting to own it. Yet for the useful articles that are included, it might be a possible purchase for a college library. Much statistics is now included in the K–12 curriculum, and any institution that trains teachers for those grades should have a collection of resources in their library on the teaching and learning of statistics. Most of the chapters here have bibliographies which might be a starting point in creating such a collection of resources.

After a few years in industry, Robert W. Hayden (bob@statland.org) taught mathematics at colleges and universities for 32 years and statistics for 20 years. In 2005 he retired from full-time classroom work. He now teaches statistics online at statistics.com and does summer workshops for high school teachers of Advanced Placement Statistics. He contributed the chapter on evaluating introductory statistics textbooks to the MAA's Teaching Statistics.