Internationales Buchprojekt „Probabilit...

Stochastics in High School Mathematics

Carmen Batanero, Manfred Borovcnik, J. Michael Shaughnessy, and Jane Watson

In this book we will review the research on adolescents' statistics and probability thinking, reasoning, and literacy with the aim to provide recommendations and orientations for teaching these topics within high school mathematics. Since the expression “high school" relates to different educational levels depending on the country, in this book we will consider students from ages 14-15 to 17-18 (grades 9-12 in the United States of America curriculum). We will use the term stochastics to highlight the mutual dependence between probabilistic and statistical knowledge and reasoning.

This book is particularly intended for mathematics and statistics educators who are responsible for the statistical education of our future secondary mathematics teachers. The audience also includes mathematics education researchers, doctoral and masters students in mathematics education, and in-service and pre-service mathematics teachers.

The book will begin with two shorter introductory chapters that will present our educational principles for teaching stochastics (Chapter 1) and the distinctive features of stochastic literacy, reasoning and sense making that students should develop (Chapter 2). Each of the following chapters will focus on a group of related fundamental stochastic ideas. These chapters will be organized according to a common structure, including an introduction, a short analysis of the main stochastic ideas in the particular topic, some specific paradigmatic examples that may serve to involve learners actively as they progress in their development of the concepts, a summary of what is known about difficulties students encounter with the related concepts, and finally some recommendations for teachers and future researchers. We will include examples or ideas for further activities or resources for the group of ideas in each chapter and provide some historical notes that shed light on ways of thinking about the concepts.

In the final chapter we will synthesize and elaborate the key ideas discussed and also will present our suggestions for future research on the teaching and learning of stochastics at high school level.