Translating statistical information given in other registers into the tabular register: a study with prospective teachers of the first school years

Abstract

This article deals with the problem of translating statistical information given in other registers into the tabular register, from the following two objectives: 1) to study the performance of prospective teachers in translating information given in the other registers into the tabular register; and 2) to compare the performance of future teachers in the different translations. The study included 30 students, future teachers of the first school years, who were attending the 1st or 2nd year of the Degree in Basic Education, at a Higher Education School in the north of Portugal. The data of the present study were obtained through the answers given by the students to four questions, which required the translation of statistical information given in the graphic, numeric-verbal and simple data list register into the tabular register. In terms of results, it is noteworthy that students were more successful in building the simple frequency tables than in building the two two-way tables and the data table grouped into class intervals, the latter being the one that proved to be the most difficult. These results, related to the translation of different registers into the tabular register, are the main contribution of the study and imply that the prospective teachers must deepen their skills of tabular representation.

Keywords:
Statistics; Tabular representations; Prospective teachers; First school years