Beyond the availability of data

Abstract

This paper presents the results of a qualitative research in which a mathematics course undergraduate student prepared classes for High School students in a Brazilian public school using real data. It consists in a case study and the results point out that student's difficulties were concentrated in the overrated mathematical approach that was initially used by her, but the main difficulty was finding real accessible data available on the internet and understandable to teachers, since almost all visited websites, when offering access to data, did not provide information about the meaning of the variables or even on the instruments that originated them. Despite the existence of websites in English for this purpose, there are few sites in other languages and little diversity of topics is addressed. Furthermore, results indicate the necessity to foster in organizations the generation of potentially usable data by teachers to provide access to them.