EarlyStatistics: Pedagogical Frameworks Report

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. Online professional development designers can benefit from access to a pedagogical framework for effective professional development in statistics education via the emergence of an online space designed to support teachers in sharing and evolving their teaching practices. This framework could also serve as a model for professional development programs in other content areas of math and science. The ultimate beneficiaries will be students, who will eventually benefit from improved curricula and teaching practices that will help them build their statistical reasoning.