C Oswald George prize announcement 2021

Abstract

The article entitled “Interrogating a measurement conjecture to introduce the concept of statistical association in upper elementary education” by Mairéad Hourigan and Aisling Leavy has been awarded the C. Oswald George prize for 2021 This paper describes an investigation involving active collecting of personal data and exploring patterns in the data, to introduce students aged 11-12 years to their first experiences of thinking about association between continuous variables. The teaching exercise was also part of preservice training, with two teacher educators working alongside five preservice primary teachers to design and implement the statistical investigation to introduce statistical association, and support future development. The lesson was taught by two preservice teachers and small group work was facilitated by the other preservice teachers and the teacher educators. The investigation was into jump height and jump length, involving careful consideration of experiment, measurement and data collection conditions. The students were then asked to attempt graphical representation of their data, leading to discussion and questions of what is relationship and how to represent it. On then being shown a scatterplot for the first time, the students moved through questions of reading the data, reading between the data and reading beyond the data. Amongst other observations, it was noted that young students tend to case-oriented views to tackle new concepts but also “possess the potential to understand the concepts of statistical association as well as the communicative function of scatter plots”. The lesson provides authentic learning experiences for both students and preservice teachers, and combines excellent statistical pedagogy and good practice in teaching statistical thinking with sound grounding in the scholarly literature of educational research. The clear exposition of this combined but authentic approach provides interesting reading for all, at any level, who aim to teach statistics from an enquiryoriented student-based approach, as it provides valuable insight into students' reactions to first meeting of this key statistical concept, its graphical representation, attendant ideas of variation and estimation, with concomitant learning for preservice primary teachers. By concluding with thoughtful reflections and suggestions for improvement of this lesson for both students and teachers, the paper reinforces its demonstration of combining scholarly work, sound pedagogy, good practice in teaching statistics, and authentic understanding of what is important in statistics to produce an interesting and thought-provoking learning experience and paper. Congratulations to the authors for their excellent paper.