Teachers' confidence in teaching statistical ideas

Teachers lack confidence in their ability to teach statistical ideas. Although understanding of school students’ development of underpinning ideas in statistics has grown, this has not been matched by a deeper realisation of how best to develop teachers’ confidence and competence in teaching statistics. As part of a larger project, 42 teachers completed a profile instrument that included a 20-item confidence inventory and, a 5-item scale addressing beliefs about statistics in everyday life. A factor analysis of the teaching confidence items indicated four factors that could be interpreted as procedural statistics, probability, the application of statistical ideas, and underlying ideas of variation and inference. To explore teachers’ confidence further individual “KidMaps” provided a profile of items unexpectedly endorsed as high or low confidence. Dissimilar patterns of response to items that loaded onto the identified factors were identified among teachers who had different overall levels of confidence