TEACHING STATISTICS WITH POSITIVE ORIENTATIONS BUT LIMITED KNOWLEDGE? TEACHERS’ PROFESSIONAL COMPETENCE IN STATISTICS

Research suggests teachers have positive motivational and emotional orientations regarding statistics but little statistical knowledge. How does this fit together? Since teachers’ professional competence in statistics has not been well explored, we asked 88 in-service mathematics teachers about their orientations regarding teaching statistics and tested their statistical content knowledge. First, we investigated how “positive” their orientations were by comparing them to their orientations regarding teaching fractions. Then, we analyzed relationships between teachers’ orientations and content knowledge in statistics using mixed-effects logistic regression models. The results showed that teachers’ orientations regarding teaching statistics were: (1) poorer than those regarding teaching fractions and (2) related to their statistical knowledge. Teachers with high self-efficacy showed higher knowledge than teachers with low self-efficacy, and anxious female teachers had higher knowledge than less anxious female teachers. We also found that knowledge decreased with increasing age of the teachers. The findings underscore the need to strengthen statistics in teacher education, including both content knowledge and the development of positive orientations.