Come away with me: Statistics learning through collaborative work

At a more technological and literate society statistics play a relevant role in order to allow people becoming critical and active citizens. Statistics is part of our daily life. Most media refer to statistical knowledge showing graphs, tables or means in order to sound scientifically supported and to be able to manipulate people’s opinion about what is going on in the world. Choosing the information one reads, analysing it, processing data and deciding different ways of presenting them are some of the competencies that we need to develop and mobilize. School practices play an essential role in the access pupils will have, or not, to these forms of literacy so deeply needed in a complex, changing and multicultural society. Nowadays most international and Portuguese policy documents refer that school should provide the means to develop each pupil’s competencies, namely the ones related to communication and to participant citizenship. Collaborative work is also suggested in many of them, namely related to statistical contents. Piaget and Vygotsky (Tryphon and Vonèche, 1996) underlined the role of communication in knowledge appropriation and in pupils’ performances. Social interaction, namely peer ones, played a main role in the process and could be seen as a facilitator when used within an innovative and coherent didactic contract (César, 1998). The need to use social marking and tasks related to pupils’ life is also easy to operacionalise in statistics and probabilities as these themes allow for establishing a relation between academic mathematics and the one used in daily life. Developing project work in statistics is a way of promoting legitimate participation contributing to pupils’ engagement in academic activities that are meaningful to them. In the last ten years we implemented Interaction and Knowledge project in several mathematics classes (5th to 12th grade). The main goal of its action research level is to study and promote peer interactions as a facilitator for knowledge appropriation and competencies development and mobilization. The data were collected through participant observation (different observers); video and audio tapping; questionnaires, interviews, pupils’ works, academic documents, and teachers’ and evaluators’ reports. Special attention was given to certain cases in each class and we will discuss some of them related to statistics leaning. Two types of collaborative work will be analysed: peer interactions within dyad work; and project work developed in small groups (usually 4 pupils). The analysis of peer interactions illuminates the role played by them in pupils’ performances, change of attitudes, sociocognitive development and school achievement. Peer interactions in statistics leaning are an effective way of avoiding pupils’ rejection of academic tasks and developing their positive academic self-esteem, their ability to find solving strategies and to become more autonomous and critical learners. They also play an essential role in order to promote inclusive schooling principles (César, submitted). The results stress the potentialities of this work and the importance of promoting meaningful statistical tasks, developed in project work, in which students chose the themes to explore, also planning and operacionalizing the different steps of their statistical work. Come away with me and discuss statistics learning through collaborative work