Research On Statistics Learning Of High School Students From The Perspective Of Statistical Activities

Facing the needs and changes of the modern society,education researchers,policy makers,and statisticians in various countries have gradually realized the importance of the teaching and learning of statistics in school curriculum since the1980 s.China’s curriculum reforms have also gradually increased the status and importance of statistical content in the mathematics curriculum.However,statistical teaching in basic education stage does not seem to meet the needs of modern society for statistics.After learning statistics,learners often fail to use it to solve practical problems in real context.Teaching statistics through practices is a way to enhance the effectiveness of statistical education.Traditional assessments method for statistics can only assess students’ knowledge and concept,and cannot assess their practical abilities.Therefore,it is very necessary to construct an assessment framework in line with the characteristics of the statistics.Based on the above considerations,one of the goals of this research is to build an assessment framework that can reflect students’ statistical learning level from the perspective of statistical activities,and on this basis,solve the following two questions:A.Before students learn statistics of high school mathematics,what are the performance characteristics and level of their statistical activities?What are the performances of statistical activities of students in each stage? Is there are differences in performance levels between liberal arts classes and science classes? If there are differences,what are the factors related to the differences?B.After students learn statistics of high school mathematics,what are the performance characteristics and level of their statistical activities?What is the performance level of students’ statistical activities during instruction?What are the performances of students in each stage after they learn high school statistics? Is there any change of students’ performances? Is there any difference between different class types of students,and has the difference changed?In order to complete the construction of the assessment framework,the author adapted the Level of Conceptual Understanding of Statistics based on the relevant researches and get an assessment framework.The framework divides statistical activities into four stages: planning and posing questions,collecting data,processing and analyzing data,inferring and interpreting conclusions.Each stage has different requirements.Based on the framework,this research has built test papers to analyzed about 170 high school students’ changes before and after learning high school statistics.In order to study statistical activities in the classroom,this research also constructs an observation framework to evaluates classroom activities from three dimensions: data,context,and variability.During the research,teachers and students were interviewed to discover their thoughts on statistical activities.Through quantitative and qualitative analysis,the main conclusions as follow:1.These is no significance improvement of students’ performance level of statistical activities after studying high school statistics compared to before studying;2.The level of students’ statistical activities in four stages are at level one,that is,students know concepts and processes but cannot flexibly solve practical questions;3.Except for the planning and posing question,the performance of students from liberal art classes is better than the students from science class.The author also found there is a strong correlation between statistical variability and students’ practice.Based on the findings,some suggestions are posed: further reform of examination questions;increase the hours of statistics;strengthen interdisciplinary link;strengthen the using of ICT;improve mathematics teachers’ ability.In the end,the author points out the limitations of this research,and puts forward the future improvements and possible future research.