An Epistemological Inquiry on the Development of Statistical Concepts

통계적 개념 발달에 관한 인식론적 고찰

We have inquired on what the statistical classes of the secondary schools had been aiming to, say the epistermlogical objects. And we now appreciate that the main obstacle to the systematic articulation is the lack of anticipation on what the statistical concepts are. This study focuses on the ingredients of the statistical concepts. Those are to be the ground of the systematic articulation of statistic courses, especially of the one for the school kids. Thus we required that those ingredients must satisfy the followings. i) directly related to the contents of statistics ii) psychologically developing iii) mutually exclusive each other as much as possible iv) exhaustive enough to cover all statistical concepts We examined what and how statisticians had been doing and the various previous views on these. After all we suggest the following three concepts are the core of conceptual developments of statistic, say the concept of distributions, the summarizing ability and the concept of samples. By the concepts of distributions we mean the frequency views on each random categories and that is developing from the count through the probability along ages. Summarizing ability is another important resources to embed his probe with the data set. It is not only viewed as a number but also to be anticipated as one reflecting a random phenomena. Inductive generalization is one of the most hazardous thing. Statistical induction is a scientific way of challenging this and this starts from distinguishing the chance with the inevitable consequences. One's inductive logic grows up along with one's deductive arguments, nevertheless they are different. The concept of samples reflects' one's view on the sample data and the way of compounding one's logic with the data within one's hypothesis. With these three in mind we observed Korean Statistic Curriculum from K to 12. Distributional concepts are dealt with throughout but not sequenced well. The way of summarization has been introduced in the 1 st, 5th, 7th and the 10th grade as a numerical value only. One activity on the concept of sample is given at the 6th grade. And it jumps into the statistical reasoning at the selective courses of ' Mathematics I ' or of ' Probability and Statistics ' in the grades of 11-12. We want to suggest further studies on the developing stages of these three conceptual features so as to obtain a firm basis of successive statistical articulation.