Every Citizen Needs to Know Statistics! What Are We Doing? Brazilian Research in Statistics Education

Abstract

This chapter aims to present an overview of the research discussed in Working Group 12 (WG12) on teaching probability and statistics, of the Brazilian Society of Mathematics Education, as it has developed during the International Seminars of Research on Mathematics Education (SIPEM). It begins by considering the emergence of statistics education as a research field in its own right in the international context and by reflecting on how Brazilian researchers became part of this movement. In sequence, the other sections present the research trajectory, highlighting the importance of studies in the field of probability and statistics education for Brazilian mathematics education. This part of the paper is organised into two main sections. The first seeks to provide the reader a general idea of the research in statistics education in Brazil, from the papers presented in the SIPEM from 2003 to 2015, which the research organised into four categories: teaching strategies; teacher training; analysis of learning and analysis of curricula and textbooks. It then goes on to consider in more detail the projects discussed at the most recent editions of SIPEM, which collectively contemplated an analysis of the knowledge of mathematics teachers to teach combinatorics; a diagnosis of the initial ideas of the teachers about the knowledge of probability; a discussion about the knowledge necessary to the future teachers of mathematics for the understanding of the concept of probability; and an evaluation of a pedagogical proposal for learning statistical inference.