Statistics Teaching in the Apis and Coopera Textbook for the Fourth Year of Elementary Education

Abstract

Statistics teaching in elementary school has been crossed by pedagogical challenges, especially concerning the contexts in which curricular topics in classroom practices and the thematic contexts and activities proposed in Text Books. Based on principles of Statistical Education related to the development of literacy, reasoning, and statistical thinking, we seek to highlight and discuss the perspectives for the teaching of Statistics, present in textbooks of the fourth year of elementary school, through the analysis of two copies distributed by National Textbook Program for the triennium 2016-2018, namely Projeto Ápis and Projeto Coopera. The qualitative research consisted of a Bardinian content analysis focusing on the nature of the mathematical activities (tasks) proposed in the examined books, through which we identified different situations related to the approach to Statistics. The situations were grouped according to their nature, constituting two characterizations of tasks based on the degree of the structure presented: closed tasks and open tasks. The closed tasks, which were based on filling in tables and reading graphs (without reflecting on their meaning), superficially address terms of basic literacy, highlighting the need for adaptations to promote more concrete learning regarding statistical reasoning. Open tasks, in turn, provide opportunities for the exploration of literacy, reasoning, and statistical thinking, advancing towards an investigative approach, which characterizes a perspective that we consider to involve education for citizenship.