Teachers

More recently qualified mathematics teachers had generally been taught statistics in their degrees. This was not necessarily the case for those who had qualified ten or more years ago. All reported having taught statistics topics that they had not met in their own training. In general, the mathematicians felt that statistics lacked the rigour of mathematics, and although they became more comfortable with teaching it, there was a feeling that ‘it lowered the tone’. There was some evidence that statistics was being used for less able students, allowing them to study ‘mathematics’ when they would find a full course in pure mathematics too demanding. There was a suggestion that this was all part of the general decline in standards of A-level mathematics.

The teachers of other disciplines (psychology, biology, etc.) seemed to lack confidence in their own understanding of the underlying principles of statistics. A number of them reported that their own training had tended to take the form of ‘cook-book’ techniques. Students' difficulties with statistics in these contexts seemed to be reflected in less emphasis on their being assessed on this aspect of the course and hence in the marginalisation, rather than integration, of statistical methodology. If user-discipline teachers wanted their students to acquire their statistical training within mathematics or statistics courses there were problems because particular techniques were not taught early enough to meet the needs of the user-discipline. There were also clear mismatches between what the user-discipline contexts needed by way of content and approach, and what constituted mathematics and/or statistics syllabuses.