Teacher narratives in making sense of the statistical mean algorithm
Date
2015-06-24
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
AOSIS Publishing
Abstract
Teaching statistics meaningfully at school level requires that mathematics teachers conduct
classroom discussions in ways that give statistical meaning to mathematical concepts and
enable learners to develop integrated statistical thinking. Key to statistical discourse are
narratives about variation within and between distributions of measurements and comparison
of varying measurements to a central anchoring value. Teachers who understand the concepts
and tools of statistics in an isolated and processual way cannot teach in such a connected way.
Teachers’ discourses about the mean tend to be particularly processual and lead to limited
understanding of the statistical mean as measure of centre in order to compare variation
within data sets. In this article I report on findings from an analysis of discussions about the
statistical mean by a group of teachers. The findings suggest that discourses for instruction
in statistics should explicitly differentiate between the everyday ‘average’ and the statistical
mean, and explain the meaning of the arithmetic algorithm for the mean. I propose a narrative
that logically explains the mean algorithm in order to establish the mean as an origin in a
measurement of variation discourse.
Description
CITATION: Lampen, E. 2015. Teacher narratives in making sense of the statistical mean algorithm. Pythagoras, 36(1), Art. #281, doi:10.4102/pythagoras.v36i1.281.
The original publication is available at http://www.pythagoras.org.za
The original publication is available at http://www.pythagoras.org.za
Keywords
Mathematics teachers -- South Africa, Statistics -- Study and teaching -- South Africa, Algorithms
Citation
Lampen, E. 2015. Teacher narratives in making sense of the statistical mean algorithm. Pythagoras, 36(1), Art. #281, doi:10.4102/pythagoras.v36i1.281.