Towards a thinking routine for the junior secondary statistics classroom

Abstract

Following international trends in education the New Zealand school curriculum is now focused on promoting students’ thinking. Previously thinking was regarded as an implicit byproduct of learning the content of a discipline. The Visible Thinking Project at Harvard University is suggesting that thinking is a disposition that can be nurtured and developed in the classroom through the use of explicit Thinking Routines. In statistics education current research is on characterizing and exploring ways to develop students’ thinking, literacy, and reasoning. The increased emphasis on development of statistical thinking is also in response to the necessity of creating statistically literate citizens for a world in which decisions, both public and private, rely on analysis of statistical information and where democratic process requires evaluation of media content. Hence this thesis aims to investigate the effectiveness of a Thinking Routine in supporting the development of students’ statistical reasoning. Since a Thinking Routine for statistics teaching did not exist, a Thinking Routine and subsequently an associated Thinking Routine Framework were created. The four-week teaching intervention focused on developing students’ inferential reasoning in comparative situations. The data collected were the Teacher Researcher’s observations of the implementation of the Thinking Routine in one Year 10 class and task-based interviews and assessment responses of four students, which tracked the development of their reasoning processes at three points in time. The student responses were analyzed using a four-element hierarchical rubric, while observations were discussed in terms of the literature. The findings indicate that a Thinking Routine, similar to those used in other subject areas, is insufficient for developing students’ statistical thinking and that both a Thinking Routine and Framework are more effective. The scaffolding provided by the Thinking Routine Framework seems to be supportive to the development of statistical thinking, reasoning and literacy. All four students showed improvements in statistical inferential thinking, constructing a statistical narrative and application of a decision guideline for making a claim but little advance in linking the contextual with the statistical. The Thinking Routine and its associated framework have real potential for making a useful contribution to the pedagogy for implementing statistical content and providing a focus for establishing statistical discourse.