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This study is designed to develop teaching materials, including a student text and a teacher's manual, for a new descriptive statistics curriculum unit for the mathematics curriculum of the first 2 years in the Junior College of Commerce or the business high school in Taiwan. Other goals of the study included investigating the appropriateness and effectiveness of the curriculum as well as the difficulties in teaching and learning the unit. Results indicate that the students did not have serious difficulty in learning the descriptive statistics unit although many have difficulty with the meanings of class limits, sketching the relative frequency distribution graphs, and correctly computing the measures of central tendency for grouped data. The curriculum components axe critiqued by experts in the field aild a discussion of their reactions is included: Results imply that descriptive statistics is of higher interest to more students than some of the traditional mathematical topics. Data also suggest that the "thinking aloud " procedure should be examined more closely in future studies. (Author/DDR) Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made 4 * from the original document