Profiling teacher capacity in statistical thinking of national curriculum reform: A comparative study between Australia and China

Abstract

In the official curriculum documents of many countries, statistical thinking have become part of the mainstream in school curriculum. We argue that teacher capacity is a key dimension in realizing essential goals for developing students' statistical literacy, reasoning and thinking in practical teaching. In this paper, a construct of Teacher Capacity was used to analyze how Australian and Chinese teachers understand and give effect to content in "Statistical thinking". The responses of the 82 teachers involved in the study to a questionnaire were analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively in terms of four criteria which form the basis of our construct of teacher capacity: Knowledge of Mathematics, Interpretation of the Intentions of the Official Mathematics Curriculum, Understanding of Students' Thinking, and Design of Teaching. These analyses gave rise to three classifications of Teacher Capacity: High, Medium and Low Capacity. Australian teachers performed slightly better on all four criteria than Chinese teachers, but there did not exist statistically significant difference. Among the four criteria, Design of Teaching appears to be the critical dimension for the implementation of curriculum reform.