Using Eurostat data to teach statistics to prospective primary teachers: on how the context of the task may promote their social awareness

The concept of statistical sense provides an understanding of the goals of statistics education and helps to clarify the design of activities that promote the development of statistical literacy, reasoning and thinking. The new approaches to statistics in schools mean special attention must be paid to teacher training. This training should enable them to develop their statistical sense while awakening their social awareness. Drawing on the idea of the cycle of learning from data, we developed an activity based on data extracted from EUROSTAT, with the goal being to find out how the social issues underlying the data might play a role in the development of a socially critical stance among prospective teachers. We also wanted to find out how the complexity of the data presented might interfere with a satisfactory resolution of the cycle of learning from data. In general, we observed that when the data were socially relevant and closely related to their interests, the activity generated opportunities for the development of their social awareness. However, the development of the cycle may have been constrained by the difficulties they encountered when handling data with characteristics typical of civic statistics. We conclude that not all the contexts that accompany the cycle of learning from data promote social awareness in the same way and that the data representations associated with the cycle must be aligned with the prospective teachers’ prior statistical knowledge.