TEACHING REFORM-ORIENTED STATISTICS IN THE MIDDLE GRADES: RESULTS FROM A CASE STUDY

With the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics, statistics has a more influential role in the middle grades curriculum than in the past However, statistics is generally not a priority in teacher professional development programs leading to teachers’ poor content knowledge in statistics and many teachers feeling unprepared to teach statistics These prove to be barriers to reform-oriented instruction, and some have recommended using lessons created by statistics educators as a way to address these barriers Unfortunately, simply having these lessons is not enough to ensure that students develop a conceptual understanding of the topic In addition, even if teachers have those lessons, there is limited research on how well instruction aligns with curriculum expectations when the lessons are implemented in the classroom and how this implementation is related to teachers’ mathematical perspectives Therefore, this descriptive case study examined the implementation fidelity, including deviations and alignment, of a reform-oriented statistics unit in a sixth-grade classroom and challenges the teacher identified regarding the implementation of the unit Implications of results to the mathematics and statistics education community are included.