Abstract
Teaching statistics has been increasingly valued in recent years. To understand the physical and social world that surrounds us, knowing how to systematize information and/or understand the information matched is fundamental. Thus, knowing how to classify data is a fundamental skill. This article aims to analyse what students between 5 and 9 years old and teachers who teach those grades know and can learn about activities involving classification. To this end, we present the results of three different studies conducted with elementary school children and teachers. The results reveal that children are able to classify from a previously defined criterion and to discover a classification criterion, but experience more difficulties when creating criteria to classify. We believe this may be explained, partially, by the lack of familiarity with this type of activity both in everyday life and at school, as they are generally asked to classify from pre-defined criteria instead of producing their own. However, since kindergarten children are already able to classify in different situations and, most importantly, they are able to learn easily the skills needed to classify, we believe that if they have instruction that leads them to reflect about classification, they learn easily, thereby evidencing the important role of the school.
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Guimarães, G., Oliveira, I. (2018). How Kindergarten and Elementary School Students Understand the Concept of Classification. In: Leavy, A., Meletiou-Mavrotheris, M., Paparistodemou, E. (eds) Statistics in Early Childhood and Primary Education. Early Mathematics Learning and Development. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-1044-7_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-1044-7_8
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