This paper reports on teachers’ perceptions about how to teach students’ statistical literacy effectively. The interview data used in the analysis were collected from high school teachers located in 7 different schools across one Australian state as part of a 3-year longitudinal study investigating students’ development of statistical literacy. The interview transcripts were examined using the software package Leximancer (Smith, 2009). This program read the text and created a concept map of the data. The resulting map supports the notion that students’ engagement with statistical programs and statistical literacy activities are enhanced when there is a focus on the students: doing; using; understanding; and discussing. The evidence is that classroom teachers’ own attitudes, knowledge, and beliefs about the curriculum content they are expected to teach significantly influences their students’ learning and educational outcomes (Hattie, 2009). If teachers are to influence their students’ learning outcomes, Shulman (1987) has argued that effective teachers require: content knowledge; general pedagogical knowledge; curriculum knowledge; pedagogical content knowledge; knowledge of learners and their characteristics; knowledge of education contexts; and finally knowledge of educational ends, purposes, and values. Given this, teachers’ own attitudes, knowledge, and beliefs associated with statistical literacy should have a direct and indirect influence on their students’ learning and educational outcomes in this domain. Statistical literacy has been defined as the ability to interpret and evaluate critically information that contained statistical elements (Callingham & Watson, 2005; Carmichael, Callingham, Watson, & Hay, 2009; Gal, 2003). The elements comprising statistical literacy have been identified by Watson (2006) to be: sampling and data collection; graphs and data presentation; average; chance; beginning inference; and variation. This challenge of enhancing students’ statistical literacy via enhancing their teachers’ knowledge of statistical literacy was a core aim of the Australian StatSmart program. StatSmart was a three year project involving 17 primary and high schools in the Australian states: South Australia; Tasmania; and Victoria (Callingham & Watson, 2007). The major educational aim of this longitudinal research has been to improve the statistical understanding of school students through the improvement of the teaching of statistics at the middle and high school levels. That is, to improve the students’ ability to interpret and critically evaluate messages that contain statistical elements. To facilitate the teachers’ statistical literacy the chief instigators provided the teachers in the StatSmart program with three resources: (1) the educational software Tinkerplots (Konold & Miller, 2005); (2) use of real data sets from the CensusAtSchool website (http://www.abs.gov.au/websitedbs/cashome.nsf/Home/Home); and (3) regular teacher workshops and information about students’ development of statistical literacy. As part of the evaluation of the StatSmart program, teacher interviews were conducted towards the end of the intervention, with each teacher having at least 18 months experience with the program. It is thus the aim of this paper to investigate the following research question: What did the teachers who participated in the StatSmart program consider to be best practice when developing their students’ statistical literacy? METHODOLOGY
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