Pre-service teacher statistical misconceptions during teacher preparation program

Abstract

The purpose of the investigation was to identify pre-service elementary teachers' (PST) misconceptions at the culmination of their methods semester, prior to entering student teaching. Participants, n=134 (116 female) were pre-service elementary teachers from two universities in the intermountain region. The Statistical Reasoning Assessment (SRA) developed by Garfield (2003) was used to investigate student misconceptions in statistics and probability. Of the eight misconceptions, the Representativeness misconception and the Outcome orientation misconception were the least common (12.3 and 28.2% respectively) and the Comparing groups of the same size, Equi-probability bias, and Correlation implies causation misconceptions were the most common (70.2, 64.3, and 50.0% respectively). The confidence interval for the results was within a window of .389 to .427. Implications from the study are several, including a standalone statistics and probability course would likely improve PST's understanding of concepts in the domains, misconceptions should be used to promote true understanding, and preparers of PST should carefully analyze their students to gain legitimate understanding of their knowledge and misconceptions in statistics and probability.