Research on probability and statistics education: Trends and directions

Abstract

This chapter provides an overview of directions and trends within the Probability and Statistics Education Working Group of Congress of European Research in Mathematics Education (CERME), and compares them with international trends in these areas. It starts with a brief history of the working group, and discusses the main themes that recurred throughout the years. These include the relation between probability and statistics, technology, teacher knowledge and the need for interventionist research that goes beyond the description of problems but offers suggestions of how to improve probability and statistics education. Probability and statistics have very different historical origins. Statistics education is a marginal discipline in the sense that it is at the boundary of many other disciplines including mathematics education, statistics and psychology. As the statistics and probability topics have become part of the mainstream mathematics curricula in various countries since the late 1990s, teachers' knowledge on these topics became an ongoing interest to mathematics education researchers.