Editorial: Special Issue: Emerging Research In Statistics Education

Longstanding efforts by different researchers who were pioneers in the field of statistics education has led today to the introduction of statistics in school mathematics in many countries. Simultaneously, the teaching and learning of statistics has turned into a research area of increasing interest for mathematics educators, as shown in the two recent survey chapters by Jones, Langrall and Money (2007) and Shaughnessy (2007) and also in the existence of journals such as Journal of Statistics Education, Teaching Statistics and, more recently, Statistics Education Research Journal, specifically focused on statistics education research. The increased research in this area might not have been noticed by mathematics educators, as statistics education receives contributions not only from them but from many other different disciplines. Research into stochastic thinking, teaching, and learning started during the 1950s with the pioneering work by Piaget and Inhelder (1951) on the growth and structure of children’s probabilistic thinking and has always had an interdisciplinary character. Because psychology is an experimental science that heavily relies on statistics, the efforts to justify the scientific character of this field led psychologists to examine the validity of their research paradigms, including the use of statistics in empirical research. An amazing observation was that statistical inference and particularly significance tests were found to be misunderstood and misused by psychologists and experimental researchers at large over 30 years ago, and that the situation still persists in spite of strong debates ever since (Morrison & Henkel, 1970; Harlow, Mulaik, & Steiger, 1997; Batanero, 2000). Moreover, researchers in the field of reasoning under uncertainty suggested more than 20 years ago that, even after statistical instruction, students and professionals tend to continue to make erroneous stochastic judgements and decisions (Kahneman, Slovic, & Tversky, 1982). Statistics is one of the most widely taught topics at university level, where many service course students meet advanced stochastic thinking without any prior or concurrent experience of advanced algebra or calculus, so that didactical problems still persist at University level (Artigue, Batanero, & Kent, 2007). The diffusion of psychological reseach results and the increasingly easy access to powerful and user-friendly computers and statistical software, which save teaching time previously devoted to laborious calculations and allow a more intuitive approach to statistics (more real data, act