Supporting shifts in teachers’ views of a classroom statistical activity: problem context in teaching statistics

We report on five-year professional development collaboration with a group of middle-school mathematics teachers during which their views of what constitutes a productive classroom statistical activity changed. The teachers? statistics instruction was initially typical in the US context and focused on producing calculations and following conventions for making graphs. In contrast, towards the end of the collaboration, teachers routinely planned statistical activities in which the generation and analysis of data was driven by a need to gain insight into a specific problem at hand. We document the changes in teachers? views of a productive classroom statistical activity and the means by which these changes were supported. In doing so, we highlight how explorations of the role of problem context in statistics provided a productive professional development focus, where teachers both built on their existing practices, and tested, in their classrooms, ideas that were novel or incongruent with their prior experiences