The Keys to the Kingdom: Why We Can’t Ignore Assessment if We Care About Real Improvement in the Teaching and Learning of Statistics

Recommendations from research for statistics teaching and learning at school level have evolved over the decades but have consistently advocated a set of broad principles: use of meaningful problems and/or realistic data, utilising technology tools, and the prioritisation of concepts over procedures. Despite this, the pipeline of this advice into policy and classroom practice has proven to be punctured. This paper presents a theoretical argument for how neoliberal imperatives in the education system within the social context of a school may act to restrict teacher agency to a narrow, assessment focused, decision space. We argue that this creates a tension between the aims of reformists in statistical education and the inertia of exam systems, presenting a case for future research on that basis.