Jill Fielding-Wells

Teaching Teachers to Teach Statistical Investigations

Despite its importance for the discipline, the statistical investigation cycle is given little attention in schools. Teachers face unique challenges in teaching statistical inquiry, with elements unfamiliar to many mathematics classrooms: Coping with uncertainty, encouraging debate and competing interpretations, and supporting student collaboration. This chapter highlights ways for teacher educators to support teachers’ learning to teach statistical inquiry. Results of two longitudinal studies are used to formulate recommendations to develop teachers’ proficiency in this area.

Fluid Methods to Make Sense of an Unknown: An Emergent Grounded Theory Study of Cultural Wellbeing

What is an appropriate structure for reporting a study of educators’ perceptions of cultural wellbeing, following an interpretive paradigm, and a grounded theory methodology?

Scaffolding Statistical Inquiries for Young Children

Statistics in the early years is often limited to the construction and ‘reading’ of simple data representations as distinct from employing statistical inquiries that engage students with data in more authentic and meaningful contexts. One of the challenges of engaging with data inquiries is the extent to which students struggle with the lack of structure and direction, thus requiring additional support, or scaffolding. This chapter details the framework used for introducing statistical inquiry to young students and then provides insights that emerged from observation and analysis of a class of 5–6 year olds engaged in their own data investigation to illustrate. The findings suggest that considerable teacher scaffolding is required to progress students through inquiries and this was largely achieved through questioning employed to focus students on both the inquiry process and the statistical content to be addressed.