Prospective secondary school teachers’ knowledge of sampling distribution properties

Abstract

The aim of the work was to assess prospective Spanish secondary school mathematics teachers’ knowledge of sampling representativeness and variability. To achieve this goal, a questionnaire with four items taken from our previous research with secondary education and high school students was proposed to 66 prospective teachers. In each item, participants were asked to provide four values of a binomial distribution, varying the parameters of the distribution in each item. The analysis of the mean and range of the sample of four values provided by the participants, and its comparison with the theoretically normative and acceptable values of the sampling distribution suggests a good knowledge of the sample representativeness, except for one item and an overestimation of the variability for large values of the number of trials in the binomial distribution. The study of the participants’ arguments serves to identify some reasoning biases related to sampling distribution. The results are better than those obtained with students in our previous studies.