2019 Volume 43 Issue 4 Pages 362-372
The concept of indeterminism is an important factor in the history of cultural anthropology; thus, the role of statistics education in dealing with indeterminism is indispensable. Statistics education is required for awareness of the relationship between statistical knowledge and contextual knowledge, as well as the shuttling between the statistical sphere and the context sphere. However, there is not yet sufficient accumulation of statistics education research. Therefore, this paper focuses on ‘context’. In Japan, statistics education is included in mathematics education, which emphasises abstraction and idealisation rather than contextual phenomena. The objective of this paper is to confirm the hypothesis that statistics education presents de-contextualised phenomena and phenomena converged on specific contexts as it progresses from elementary school to upper secondary school.
In order to achieve our objective, we analysed statistical problems in textbooks through a comparison of different types of schools. As a result of the textbook comparison, we found that de-contextualised phenomena and phenomena converged on specific contexts are occurring in Japanese statistics education.
