A SURVEY OF THE TEACHING OF STATISTICAL LITERACY, REASONING AND THINKING: TEACHERS’ CLASSROOM PRACTICE IN MEXICAN HIGH SCHOOL EDUCATION

This paper presents partial results of a one-year project funded by a grant from Mexico’s National Science and Technology Council and the National Institute for the Evaluation of Education that was designed to characterize the teaching of statistics in Mexican high school education. Work was organized in two 6-month phases. The first stage involved documentary research that consisted of analyzing the study programs of statistics courses used at 12 high school-level educational systems. The second used the field research technique to design and administer a survey called “Teaching Statistical Literacy, Reasoning and Thinking” (TSLRT), that was answered by 754 high school statistics teachers at those 12 educational systems. Both phases were based on the theoretical ideas of statistical literacy, reasoning and thinking, and were conducted with the aim of constructing a reference framework to analyze the study programs (phase one) and design the items included in the TSLRT survey (phase two). Here, we report results from the survey applied, which was comprised of 18 items on sociodemographic variables and 65 Likert scale items that measured the degree to which teachers’ classroom practice focused on elements of statistical literacy, reasoning and thinking, or shared elements. Confirmatory factor analysis was applied to the responses to the 65 Likert scale items. Results indicate that the responses fit a one-dimensional model. Finally, we discuss the pedagogical and theoretical implications of the TSLRT survey results.