The understanding of Stochastic brought from basic education by Mathematics prospective teachers in an introductory Statistics course

The National Common Curriculum Base made statistics teaching mandatory in basic education. The teaching degree in mathematics began to receive students who possibly had contact with statistics previously. Thus, the research sought to answer the following questions: What understandings about Stochastic are there, and what use do these prospective teachers bring from school? A questionnaire on the topic was administered to a group of mathematics undergraduates in an introductory statistics course. Data analysis indicates that, although most undergraduates had already had some contact with statistics at school and realized its importance, this knowledge was restricted to procedural aspects of descriptive statistics, associated only with some types of graphs and the application of formulas in centrality measures. Talking about variability and uncertainty was also difficult. Besides, although everyone claimed to know probability, there was a lack of knowledge about statistical inference.