Redesigning a Statistics Literacy Course to Help Prepare Pre-service Teachers to Teach (Statistics to) English Language Learners

Abstract

A university’s statistics literacy course was redesigned to give its biggest clientele (pre-service elementary and middle school teachers) content and pedagogy to improve their learning and make their future teaching more effective in a geographic region with a significant proportion of English language learners (ELLs) students. The research-informed redesign made the course more accessible and useful and yielded insights about the distinctive ways in which ELL-responsive pedagogy plays out in the statistics classroom, a context that had received little specific attention (compared to the mathematics classroom) despite its rapidly-growing importance in curricular and societal trends.