People need to know how to deal with “information” encountered from daily life experiences (Garfield & Ben-Zvi, 2008). The “information” is called data needed to be systematically and critically handled.  Statistics is a discipline that helps people make sense of the data by reading, analyzing, and making inferences systematically and critically (Shaugnessy, 2007).  Statistics education aims to contribute to people’s daily lives in order them to be informed, citizens. Therefore, statistical literacy is one of the crucial goals of statistical instruction (Shaugnessy, 2007).  In addition to statistical literacy, statistics education needs to promote statistical thinking through emphasizing statistical investigations. The students need to act like a researcher to deal with a problem with a scientific perspective. They need to follow a specific process forming a statistical question, collecting data, analyzing data, and interpreting the data (Litke & Hill, 2020).  Although the statistics domain is covered in mathematics classrooms by mathematics teachers in most countries, statistics, as a discipline different from mathematics, needs context. However, it uses mathematical procedures to make use of data. Based on the nature of statistics, researchers in statistics education define how statistics education should be and how statistical concepts need to be addressed to the students (Eichler, 2008; GAISE, 2005). However, the research shows that statistics are covered by mathematics teachers with a focus on mathematical aspects. In the Turkish curriculum, statistical concepts were established as mathematical formulas before 2005.  Each curriculum change after 2005 focuses on statistical processes, but there is limited evidence on the changes in the practice (Şeker, 2019). Mathematics teachers have important roles in reaching the goal of statistics education. Teachers are the ones who shape the instruction. Their content knowledge and pedagogical content related to the learning domain are important components for teaching effectiveness (Charalambous & Hill, 2012).   Few studies investigate what math teachers know about statistics and data handling (e.g. Jacobbe, 2012). There is a need for understanding what the mathematics teachers know about what they teach in data handling and statistics to contribute to teacher education in statistics (Jacobbe, 2012).  Therefore, the purpose of this study is to explore how Turkish mathematics teachers conceptualize the statistics and statistical concepts they teach in data handling.

This is a qualitative case study. This study’s participants were four mathematics teachers who had 7 years, 8 years, 11years, and 15 years of experience teaching mathematics. They were all working at a public middle school. They were all teaching 7th-grade mathematics, including the broadest objectives for statistics instruction for K-8 education. The objectives cover circle graph, line graph, average concepts, and transformations among graphs. Three mathematics teachers were interviewed on their understanding of what they teach in statistics instruction. The interview questions are adapted from “Statistical Content Interview” (Jacobbe, 2007). The original interview protocol questions were what data, mean, median, and mode are, how they find them if there is more than one way to find them, what information the value tells them, etc. Furthermore, since the focus of the curriculum was in the statistical investigations, four questions were added; “what is statistics?”, “could you describe the data collection process?”, “How would you organize data? Which kinds of graphs are used? Describe the purposes of the graphs”, and “what is data analysis? How would you teach data analysis?” etc. The interviews took approximately 20 minutes. Then the interviews were transcribed for the coding process. I conducted open-coding. The themes emerged from the questions (e.g., “defining data,” “defining statistics,” “data collection”, “data analysis,” “teaching data analysis”, “average”).

Preliminary findings showed that mathematics teachers described statistics as a discipline different from mathematics, a process. One mentioned that statistics is not separate from mathematics; it is a part of mathematics. Three of them defined data as information; one explained it as a comment and numerical values. They described the data collection process with research problems, research questions, questions, and participants’ characteristics. One mentioned the importance of representativeness of the participants, the sample, and the population. In the data organization theme, one explained the use of software for data organization. Besides, the purposes of graph types and where to use the graphs are other emerged codes. They described data analysis as reaching a conclusion and commenting on information obtained. One teacher said that she does not know about cautions during data analysis. Still, others described the cautions as not deceiving people, selecting appropriate participants, consistency with the study’s purpose, and choosing appropriate analysis methods. Then they defined average and different types of averages. They mostly defined moderate concepts as a tendency and “approximately.” Moreover, typical value, information obtained from a group, and arithmetic mean are also other codes that appeared in the interviews. They answered why they used three different types of average, mostly focusing on “for different contexts.” Their responses also include “ for setting a standard, for the comparisons of the results, and for the accuracy of the results.” They defined each average concept mostly procedurally, not conceptually. For example, they described the arithmetic mean as “a calculation, and “the number that was found by adding all data in a data set and dividing them by the number of data. The details regarding arithmetic mean, median, and mode will be presented during the conference.

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