Page 310 - Invited Paper Session (IPS) - Volume 2

IPS249 Terán, Teresita
Through a survey organized by the Ministry of Education it can be observed
that statistical contents at this level are almost inexistent; it is claimed that
since they are mostly at the end of the curricula, they are hardly ever covered.
This is the second big failure observed.
Secondary Education is divided into two cycles: A Basic cycle, common to
every orientation and an Oriented cycle, specific to different areas of
knowledge, the social world and work. Secondary Education is compulsory and
constitutes a pedagogic and organizational unit devoted to adolescents and
young people who have completed the level of Primary Education. Secondary
Education, including all its modalities and orientations, aims at enabling
adolescents and young people to their full commitment as citizens, for their
work and for their future studies. Young age entitles that adolescents face the
challenge to build their own life projects. At this stage, young people search,
rehearse, take and leave, try their limits, define their tastes and ideas. At
Secondary Education, within the math syllabus, a set of knowledge on statistics
and probability is imparted. Historically, mathematical thinking has been
based on a deterministic idea which has excluded the intervention of those
variables which gave place to unpredictable processes from the solutions that
math provided, an idea that has been reinforced from school math. It is
important to solve problems that allow the recognition and use of probability
as a way to quantify uncertainty.
Resources used on media to describe information have a great
mathematical foundation and citizens should be prepared to understand what
they receive and make decisions based on that. In this respect, we can consider
the most varied sections on newspapers where we can find expressions such
as average value, tendencies, estimates, chance that belong to the jargon of
Statistics. This situation makes the mathematical work in relation to the
newspaper very important, because apart from the mathematical thinking, it
comprises the ethics behind teaching students to discriminate the way we
inform.
Likewise, it is important that students collect or find the information on
databases. This will be the starting point for the formulation of questions or
hypotheses about the problems to solve. It becomes necessary to organize the
information into charts or graphs, by the ICT, and based on the analysis of the
data gathered, to select the statistical measures that can be more
representative.
Probability like statistics are concept integrators, which allow their
treatment with contents from other axis, like sides of the same mathematical
work, which include not only deterministic thinking but also random thinking.
Higher Education comprises universities and university institutes, state-owned
or private authorized, in accordance to the established denomination in Law
Nº 24.521.

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