The nature and use of theories in statistics education

This chapter presents a literature review of theories used to frame and underpin Statistics Education Research. The aim is to describe, characterize and arrange the nature and use of theories in SER and hint at some potential trends and required directions for further theorizing the SER discipline. The review includes empirical research papers, published from 2004 to 2015, and focuses on students’ learning of statistics or probability at the primary and secondary school level. The number of papers that fulfilled our inclusion criteria was 35.

We distinguish five types of theories used in SER: Statistical Product Theories, Statistical Process Theories, Theories with a Didactical Focus, Theories in Mathematics/Science Education and Theories with a Broader Range on Epistemological Aspects. For further theoretical elaboration, we argue that SER pay attention to the relationship between personal and formal views of statistics, to the dynamics between categories or levels in student thinking and to the role of technology and context in the learning of statistics and probability. We end the chapter by thinking through potential benefits of a semantic theory, inferentialism, that has been proposed as underpinning research on statistical inference.