THE SUBJECT OF STATISTICS IN NATURAL SCIENCE CURRICULA: A CASE STUDY

Abstract

Statistics is considered to be an indispensable part of a wide range of curricula across the globe, natural science curricula included. Teachers and curriculum developers are typically confronted with four questions with regard to the role and position of statistics in a curriculum: (1) how to integrate statistics in the curriculum; (2) which topics to cover and in what detail; (3) how much time to allocate to statistics in a curriculum; and (4) how to organize a course and which study materials to select. This paper addresses these four questions through a case study: four curricula at Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic, are compared in terms of how they address these four questions. Placing this comparison in a framework of cognitive load theory and two decades of research inspired by this theory, this paper concludes with a number of guidelines for addressing the aforementioned four questions when designing a curriculum.

Keywords

• Statistics education
• course analysis
• curriculum development
• cognitive load theory