Sammendrag
The Lisbon European Council of 2000 placed the development of a knowledge-based society at the top of the Union?s policy agenda. The development of a statistically literate society is a key factor in achieving the objective of an educated citizenry. In a world where the ability to analyze, interpret and communicate information from data are skills needed for daily life and effective citizenship, statistical concepts are occupying an increasingly important role in mathematics curricula. However, despite the larger place for statistics in school curricula, the subject has been introduced without adequate attention paid to teachers? professional development. There is substantial evidence of poor understanding and insufficient preparation to teach statistical concepts among both pre-service and practicing teachers (Carnel, 1997; Begg & Edward, 1999). As Lajoie and Romberg (1998) point out, statistics may be as new a topic for teachers as for children. Many of the older teachers have never formally studied statistics. Younger teachers may have taken an introductory course at college, such a course however does not typically adequately prepare future teachers to teach statistics. College-level statistics courses are often lecture-based courses that do not allow future teachers to experience the model of data-driven, activity-based, and discovery-oriented statistics they will eventually be expected to adopt in their teaching practices. EarlyStatistics aims to enhance the quality of statistics education offered in European schools by facilitating intercultural professional development of teachers using exemplary web-based educational tools and resources. Acknowledging the fact that teachers are at the heart of any educational reform effort, the project will develop and pilot test an innovative online professional development course in statistics education to geographically-dispersed elementary and middle school teachers across Europe. The design of the course will be based on current pedagogical methodologies utilizing collaboration, statistical investigation, and exploration with online interactive problem-solving activities. Teachers in different countries will have the opportunity to collaborate and build communities of practice in social constructivist learning environments. Long-term sustainability will be assured through support of multilingual interfaces and online services for the accumulation of collective knowledge from teachers and teacher educators. An online information base will offer access to usable and validated pedagogical models, didactic approaches, and innovative instructional materials for the teaching and learning of statistics, resulting in a complete and flexible teacher professional development program, that will be of use not only to the teachers participating in the course, but also for independent study. The project outputs and services will be useful not only to teachers, but also to academic experts in statistics education, to national and European Education boards, to teacher training institutions, and to designers of online professional development programs. The ultimate beneficiaries will be students, who will eventually benefit from improved curricula and teaching practices that will help them build their statistical reasoning.
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