The impact of curriculum change on the teaching and learning of time series

Abstract

The secondary school statistics curriculum in New Zealand has experienced substantial change since 2010. The catalyst for these changes was a desire to improve students’ statistical reasoning and to narrow the gap between the statistics taught in secondary school classrooms and the practices and thinking of professional statisticians. Anecdotal evidence suggested the quality of Year 13 student work in time series had improved. This research, therefore, sought to provide a robust analysis of changes in learning outcomes of Year 13 students in time series, in order to determine whether these claims could be supported. Furthermore a literature review produced no evidence of any prior research in the area of student reasoning with time series at this level. Ethical and time considerations prevented access to samples of student NCEA work on time series completed before and after the curriculum change. Instead exemplars of student work distributed by the New Zealand Qualifications Authority (NZQA), which were freely available on the internet, were utilised. In total 35 exemplars of student work were analysed. In order to obtain a more holistic perspective of the curriculum change, 18 teachers were surveyed and five were interviewed. These secondary data sources provided data about teachers’ perceptions of the curriculum change. Since a framework for assessing student learning outcomes for time series did not exist, a framework was developed based on the student data and a synthesis of established frameworks concerned with levels and development of mathematical reasoning, dimensions of statistical reasoning and interpretation of data and data displays. Analysis of student exemplars against the framework provided strong evidence that after the curriculum change higher levels of reasoning were observed. The shift towards higher levels of reasoning was observed at all levels of achievement – Achieved, Merit and Excellence. The style of student exemplars changed to include a more complete report style response, integrating other research findings that either confirmed or refuted the student’s own findings. One of the major facilitators of this change was the availability of free data visualisation software, which liberated teaching and assessment time from a focus on procedures to one of data interpretation and interrogation. The implication of these findings suggest that the framework developed for this study could be used by teachers in order to scaffold their students’ reasoning to higher levels and that other NCEA Achievement Standards could be similarly scrutinised in order to evaluate the effect of curriculum change.