Analysis of prospective elementary school teachers' graph understanding: From a data analysis perspective

Objectives In this study, we investigated prospective elementary school teachers' graph comprehension from a data analysis perspective. In particular, we aimed to analyze the difficulties that prospective teachers encountered in selecting graphs or presenting interpretations that could support hypotheses when using graphs to support hypotheses. Methods Prospective elementary school teachers were provided with a set of data in an Excel file, and were asked to present hypotheses that could be derived from this data along with evidence. The 38 data collected from prospective teachers were analyzed based on two criteria: (1) appropriateness of graph selection (2) appropriateness of graph interpretation Results There were two main difficulties shown by prospective teachers. One was to use a bar graph instead of a histogram to represent numerical data, and to use a line graph instead of a scatterplot to analyze the relationship between two variables. The other was that when it was necessary to determine whether to adopt a hypothesis by identifying trends in the data, they made incorrect judgments by relying too much on singular values. Conclusions Considering these difficulties, it is necessary to consider the following in the mathematics curriculum. First, graph comparison activities need to be sufficiently addressed in the curriculum. Second, there is a need to learn about the types of data. Third, there is a need to provide flexibility in graph selection depending on the type of data. Fourth, there is a need to find ways to strengthen students' concept of distribution.