Abstract:
In 2010 the statistics strand of The New Zealand Curriculum began to be implemented in secondary schools in New Zealand. This paper describes how a group of professional statisticians, statistics education researchers, and practising teachers worked together to produce curriculum support material that reflected modern and future statistical practice and that incorporated statistics education research findings about student learning. Since the approach to teaching statistics and the content was new, particularly in the area of statistical inference, we refer to how the group mounted two large consecutive two-year research projects, which were aligned with the staged introduction of the secondary curriculum in order to support teachers in the upcoming changes. With such a transformative change to the statistics curriculum we discuss also how the group needed to work on many other fronts to ensure key stakeholders in the education enterprise were conversant with the changes. This case study of a major change in a school statistics curriculum discusses the benefits of collaboration between statisticians, researchers, and educators and the challenges involved in trying to ensure that the curriculum was interpreted as it was intended and implemented successfully across the country.
