Implementing Civic Statistics in Mathematics Teacher Education

This chapter describes and reflects on a course for prospective secondary school mathematics teachers designed to provide improved skills and confidence in understanding statistics about trends and current or projected changes in society. It outlines a new type of introductory statistics course which focuses on Civic Statistics. The course aims at developing statistical content knowledge with regard to Civic Statistics, critical thinking, cross-disciplinarity, contextual knowledge as well as subject-matter related pedagogical competencies, and technological competencies. A specific challenge is to get students majoring in mathematics engaged with socio-politically sensitive and controversial issues, and to get them to reflect about these topics from an instructional and educational perspective. A distinct part of the course is a unit called “Critical questioning of data-based statements in the media” which focuses on deconstructing media headlines by evaluating claims using the original data and information about the research design. The course design is based on principles associated with the Statistical Reasoning Learning Environment (Garfield & Ben-Zvi. Teaching Statistics 31(3):72–77, 2009) as well as the recommendations of the ProCivicStat Partners (Engaging civic statistics: A call for action and recommendations. A product of the ProCivicStat Project. https://iase-web.org/islp/pcs , 2018), and is characterised by the use of authentic multivariate data for Civic Statistics in teaching.