Canadian School Administrators' Statistical Reasoning About Probability, Effect, and Representativeness

• Author(s) / Creator(s)

  • Hunter, Darryl M.

• SSHRC IG awarded 2021. Canadian adults are well below adults in comparator countries in their ability to use mathematical information (Statistics Canada, 2013). Are French- and English-speaking school leaders any different? That's what our proposed study will find out. Presently, we have almost no understanding of the ways that school leaders use numeric evidence. Our four-year study will examine how school principals interpret, act upon, and explain numeric information -- specifically the concepts of probability and likelihood (year 1), effect size and causality (year 2), sampling error and representative sample (year 3)-- looking for common misconceptions (year 4). We are studying bilingualism's impact on evidence-informed decision-making in K-12 schools.

  Our proposed study is part of a larger initiative to understand school leaders' statistical competence. The Principal Investigator, Dr. Hunter of the Faculty of Education, has previously investigated school principals' concepts of central tendency, proportion, and variation (Hunter 2014, 2020). He has teamed with Co-Investigator Dr. Samira ElAtia, Faculté Saint-Jean, for this English and French research grounded in the pragmatic philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce. Peirce's logic about deductive-inductive-abductive reasoning patterns, his semiotic, and his tripartite phenomenology are still relevant today to help us understand how adults cope with statistical signs. Literature reviews will define current knowledge relating to adults' and, more specifically, school leaders' statistical competency. In each year for this bilingual study, 20 school principals, half in English and half in Francophone/French immersion schools, will be interviewed twice (a total of 40 interviews per year) using read-aloud protocols and (semi) structured interview questions to investigate how they construe student grades and achievement statistics. The interviews will be transcribed and cross-translated in both official languages. Then the interview transcripts and recordings will be coded using Peirce's phenomenology to a) discern the statistical ideas of school principals as reader-leaders, b) apply Peirce's logic of deduction, induction and abduction, and c) identify gestures as forms of Peirce's embodied cognition.

• Date created

  2020-01-01

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Insight Grant
  • IG
  • SSHRC
  • Statistical Reasoning
  • School Leaders
  • Interviews
  • Phenomenology
  • Educational Administration
  • Measurement and Evaluation
  • Education
  • 2021-2025
  • Western Canada
  • Central Canada

• Type of Item

  Research Material

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-qbp3-b848

• License

  © Hunter, Darryl. All rights reserved other than by permission. This document is embargoed to those without UAlberta CCID until 2027.