Prospective Teachers’ Understanding of the Effects on Central Tendency Measures when Adding New Data to a Set

Abstract

In this work, we study the understanding of students, prospective primary school teachers, about data that must be added to a given series to obtain certain values of the central tendency measures. To this end, a quantitative, descriptive study was carried out, in which 34 students from the 2nd year of the Basic Education Degree course at a university in the North of Portugal participated, and the data was obtained in a context of formal evaluation carried out in the scope of the Probability and Statistics course unit. Here, in this work, we will explore only one task, exactly the one in which students were asked about the data to be added to a given series to obtain specified values for the central tendency measures. In terms of the main results obtained, we highlighted a very satisfactory performance of students in terms of correct answers. However, these correct answers, regarding the values to be added, often did not result from a rational and comprehensive explanation of their origin. Hence, the present study highlights the need for these students, prospective primary school teachers, to verbalize and explain their ideas, aspects that will be of the greatest relevance in their future teaching profession. On the other hand, among the central tendency measures (mode, median, and mean), it was found that students experienced greater difficulties when a mean value was involved, which may be due to their unique determination.

Keywords:
Statistics Education; Central Tendency Measures; Prospective Teachers; Primary School