Using Technology to Support In-Service Teachers' Conjecturing in Statistics Professional Development

• Activity Number: 135
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Monday, August 5, 2013 : 8:30 AM to 10:20 AM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistical Education
• Author(s): Jeremy Strayer*+ and Brandon Hanson
• Companies: Middle Tennessee State University and Middle Tennessee State University
• Keywords: Teacher professional development ; Conjecturing tasks ; Misconceptions ; Statistical conceptual knowledge

Abstract

The evolution of mathematics and science education standards has established a cross-curricular emphasis on data driven decision making and has, in turn, created a demand for teachers to deepen their conceptual statistical knowledge. With many teachers' limited education in statistics and latent misconceptions of core statistical concepts, addressing this demand can be a challenge. In this paper, we describe how middle and high school math and science teachers used a conjecturing task in a professional development setting to deepen their conceptual statistical knowledge. First, we describe the nature of conjecturing tasks and review how they have been used during instruction in mathematics education studies. Then, we provide a detailed analysis of how in-service teachers completed the Exploring Data Sets conjecturing task. Specifically, we examine alternative statistical conceptions that teacher participants held, illustrate the ways the conjecturing task transformed teacher participants' statistical understandings, and depict the ways teacher participants used technology to support and revise their statistical understandings as they completed the conjecturing task.