Abstract:
The secondary school statistics curriculum in New Zealand has experienced substantial change. The catalyst for these changes was a desire to improve students’ statistical reasoning and to narrow the gap between the statistics taught 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 sought to test whether these claims could be supported. Exemplars of student work before and after the curriculum change were analysed. To obtain a more holistic perspective of the curriculum change, teachers were also surveyed and/or interviewed. To analyse the exemplars a framework was developed based on the student data and a synthesis of established frameworks from the literature concerned with levels and development of mathematical reasoning, dimensions of statistical reasoning and interpretation of data and data displays. Analysis of exemplars against the framework provided strong evidence that after the curriculum change higher levels of reasoning were observed for time series. A major facilitator of this change was the availability of free data visualisation software, which liberated teaching and assessment from a focus on procedures to one of data interpretation and interrogation.