2024 AMTE Dissertation Award
Nina Bailey
Montclair State University
Describing Critical Statistical Literacy Habits of Mind
Biography
Nina’s passion for critical statistical literacy began in her early teaching career. She often asked students (high school and undergraduate) to make sense of data representations from the real world. She found that many students often considered the statistics superficially by avoiding or not addressing controversial issues in conjunction with statistics and/or not connecting the statistical messages to issues of power. She had very few students who seemed to integrate their critical understanding of the world with their statistical knowledge. She hypothesized this was in part due to the lack of opportunities given to students to consider the non-neutral nature of statistics and mathematics. Such experiences made Nina wonder about how to best support students and teachers in developing these skills, specifically seeing how statistics is inextricably linked to decision making and issues of power. This curiosity sparked Nina’s dissertation research. The literature on statistical literacy focused primarily on the statistical content knowledge needed to make sense of statistical messages. Further, the overwhelming majority of frameworks for statistical literacy did not incorporate a critical* lens. Nina felt it was important to clearly articulate critical statistical literacy habits of mind (CSLHM), develop a usable conceptual framework for classrooms, provide an analytic framework to inform further research, and explore how individuals enact those habits of mind.
In her position as an assistant professor at Montclair State University, Nina continues to explore how best to help future teachers discover the non-neutrality of mathematics and statistics and ponder what that means for their teaching. Moving forward, Nina plans to continue to study how to support students and future teachers develop CSLHM. She will also continue to study teacher noticing of students’ mathematical thinking on technology-enhanced math tasks (work she began as a graduate research assistant). More specifically, she will focus on teacher noticing of students’ statistical thinking on technology-enhanced tasks, how the CSLHM framework can support the development of social justice statistics tasks, and how the CSLHM framework can inform noticing on such tasks.
Nina would like to thank her chair, Dr. Allison McCulloch, her committee, Drs. Luke Reinke, Michelle Stefan, Victor Cifarelli, and Jennifer Lovett, and her new colleagues at Montclair, Drs. Eileen Fernández, Steven Greenstein, Mika Munakata, Nicole Panorkou, and Joseph DiNapoli for their belief and support in her research. She would also like to thank all of the participants that made her research possible.
*Note that Nina is using the word critical to refer to how it is generally used in critical literacies to emphasize the relationship between literacy and power (Lankshear & McLaren, 1993).