Effects of an Inquiry-Oriented Curriculum and Professional Development Program on Grade 7 Students' Understanding of Statistics and on Statistics Instruction

On average, Florida students earn only half of the points possible in the statistics content area of the state's annual mathematics assessment. Leaders in Broward County Public Schools, a large, diverse, urban school district, viewed changes to statistics curriculum and instruction as one way to address this issue. This study randomly assigned 40 middle schools in the district to either implement a replacement curriculum unit with four days of teacher professional development in probability and statistics or continue with their practice-as-usual instruction in probability and statistics. The replacement unit supported teaching and learning of all the probability and statistics standards in the grade 7 course description. The replacement unit with the associated professional development, called the Supporting Teacher Enactment of the Probability and Statistics Standards program, improved student understanding of statistics and statistics instruction. The magnitude of the effect on student understanding was 23 percent of 1 standard deviation, which is comparable to an increase of 9 percentile points for an average student. [For the appendixes, see ED610168. For the study snapshot, see ED610167.]