Irene Cazorla

Statistics School Curricula in Brazil

In Brazilian basic education, National Curricular Parameters recommend the inclusion of probability and statistics as part of mathematics. Despite the innovative character and methodological guidelines focused on the formation of a scientific spirit and on civic preparation, teaching probability and statistics faces difficulties because of lack of training for teachers, didactic materials, and availability of software, among others. Therefore, statistics educators in Brazil have hard but promising work ahead.

Conception and alternative conception of mean: a comparative study among teachers and students from basic school

RESUMO O presente estudo analisa concepcoes de estudantes e professores sobre media, tanto aquelas validas quanto as alternativas, com validade para alguns casos. Um teste, em lapis e papel, composto de 3 questoes foi elaborado e aplicado com 287 estudantes e professores brasileiros, dos quais: 54 eram alunos da 4a serie e 47 eram da 5a serie do ensino fundamental, 61 eram estudantes iniciantes e 82 eram estudantes concluintes do curso de pedagogia, e 43 eram professores das series iniciais do ensino fundamental. O teste foi aplicado de forma coletiva, em sala de aula. Excetuando o grupo de professores, todos os grupos tendem a confundir media com adicao dos valores ou com o valor maximo. Os resultados mostram que, apesar da evolucao no entendimento do conceito de media em relacao ao nivel de escolaridade, algumas confusoes ainda sao identificadas entre o grupo de professores.

Statistical Training of Pre-service Teachers with Application in School Practice

This chapter discusses the way that actions developed under a programme from the Brazilian government can contribute to the learning of teaching, by considering four pre-service mathematics teachers (undergraduate students), from the university in Sao Paulo, who participated in a training activity using Didactical Sequences (DS) of Statistics, and then applied these to students in their sixth to ninth years of schooling. It is considered that programme has provided training times to pre-service teachers, who learn the necessary concepts for teaching, as well as how to prepare and execute activities in the classroom with the guidance and under the supervision of professors and teachers. Therefore, those activities provide security for pre-service teachers in their teacher training.

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.