Analysis reveals segmented teaching of representative values and dispersion measures in Korea, suggesting improvements for better understanding and applications.
This study attempts to critically analyze how representative values and dispersion measures are taught in the concept of distribution in the Korean school mathematics curriculum. First, we analyze the statistical significance of representative values and dispersion measures as measures that numerically summarize the center and spread of distributions, respectively. Based on this, we found that they are taught in a formal and segmented way in the Korean school mathematics curriculum without understanding the concept of distribution as a big idea of statistics education. By referring to curricula and textbooks from the US, UK, Japan, and New Zealand, we derived some implications for improving the teaching of representative values and dispersion measures, including (1) connections to graphical displays of distributions, (2) opportunities for statistical inference by comparing two data sets, and (3) an integrated approach to representative values and dispersion measures. To this end, we recommend explicit teaching of data types and distribution concepts, introduction of dot plots, introduction of range and interquartile range as dispersion measures, and early teaching of the median.
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Tak et al. (2025) studied this question.
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