Design, realization and evaluation of a statistics course for preservice teachers for primary school in Germany

Abstract

We designed and developed a statistics course “Data & chance for primary school” that aims at developing content knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge, and technological knowledge of preservice primary school teachers. The course consists of weekly lectures where the content and the technological knowledge components are developed and of a weekly accompanying small- group seminar. The course is designed with statistical reasoning learning environment principles; interface tasks that bridge content knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge play a fundamental role in the course. Three topics are taught: data analysis, combinatorics, and introduction into probability via stochastic simulations. The first results—from online surveys before and after the course (n=189), evaluation of participants’ written homework assignments, and a written test administered after the course—show that statistical thinking of our preservice teachers improves over time and that they show more positive attitudes towards statistics after having attended the course.