Claudia Borim da Silva

Atitudes em relação à estatística e à matemática

This study verified if the attitudes toward statistics should be related by the attitudes toward mathematics developed during the students school life. The subjects were 330 undergraduate students who passed in Introductory Statistics in 1998. It was applied a questionnaire, a scale of attitudes towards statistics and a scale of attitudes towards mathematics. Both the scales presented a high intern consistent. The students presented more positive attitudes toward mathematics instead of statistics. There wasn’t attitudes difference in relation to gender. The exacts science students presented attitudes more positive toward mathematics and the science human students presented attitudes more negative toward statistics. The results indicated that there is a association of the attitudes towards mathematics with a the attitudes towards statistics and this association is more strong in students of science human courses.

Exploring Dot Plot in the Perspective of Embodied Cognition

The effective inclusion of Probability and Statistics teaching in Brazilian schools faces great challenges, including teachers’ training and a lack of didactic materials and software. Conceptual errors are common, even with teachers and textbooks, and many important graphs are not explored. A group of Statistics educators developed a free virtual learning environment with didactic sequences (DS) to help Probability and Statistics teachers at school. The objective of this chapter was to present theoretical aspects of human and paper dot plot exploration in the perspective of embodied cognition, and then explore students’ experiences with human and paper dot plots. It was observed that the human dot plot as a graphic representation seemed to then become less abstract.