Abstract
The South African educational system is in a state of transformation as the Government embarks on a process of grappling with legacies of the past, whilst balancing risks and opportunities for the future. Accordingly, a new school curriculum with outcomes-based education as the fundamental building block was introduced along a sliding scale, starting in 1997. This curriculum, with a vast statistics content, has the potential to change the face of statistics education in South Africa, as statistics had previously been virtually absent from the school syllabus. This article highlights the challenges to and opportunities for optimising the teaching of statistics across all education levels in South Africa.
Highlights
In this information-driven society it is vital that all citizens are able to orient themselves in a world where evidence-based decision making is likely to call for data collection, organisational, analytical, interpretation and communication skills
The statistics component of the National Curriculum Statement (NCS) was initially developed by the Department of Education without any input from the South African Statistical Association (SASA), the mouthpiece of the majority of professional and practicing statisticians in South Africa
In 1998 contact was made with the Association for Mathematics Education of South Africa (AMESA), the association to which school mathematics teachers belong, with a view to closer collaboration with the intention of including school teachers in some of the initiatives of the Sixth International Conference on Teaching Statistics (North & Zewotir, 2006a)
Summary
In this information-driven society it is vital that all citizens are able to orient themselves in a world where evidence-based decision making is likely to call for data collection, organisational, analytical, interpretation and communication skills. One of the specific outcomes identified in the school mathematics curriculum is the use of data from various contexts to make informed judgements (Steffens & Fletcher, 1999; North & Zewotir, 2006a). The statistics component of the NCS was initially developed by the Department of Education without any input from the South African Statistical Association (SASA), the mouthpiece of the majority of professional and practicing statisticians in South Africa.
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