Supporting Teacher Enactment of the Probability and Statistics Standards (STEPSS)–Replication Study
Funding Partner: Institute of Education Sciences
Principal Investigator: Dr. Robert C. Schoen
Project Announcement
August 1, 2024
The Learning Systems Institute has been awarded a four-year, $4 million grant by The U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences.
Dr. Robert Schoen, will serve as the principal investigator on the Supporting Teacher Enactment of the Probability and Statistics Standards (STEPSS)–Replication study. Schoen is the Associate Director for the Florida Center for Research in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (FCR-STEM) at the Learning Systems Institute (LSI) and associate professor of mathematics education at the FSU College of Education, Health and Human Sciences (CEHHS).
“Many of the fastest-growing job fields worldwide involve statistics and data literacy,” said Schoen. "It is well established that people and organizations with statistical and data literacy have a strategic advantage in many endeavors, including business, science, politics, sports, and national security.”
Despite the need for a statistically literature population in the Information Age, educational data show disturbing trends in statistical literacy. Longitudinal data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress indicate persistent decreases in the competence of middle-school students in data analysis, statistics, and probability in Florida and across the U.S. over the past decade.
“We urgently need to identify more effective ways to teach statistics and data literacy at a large scale,” said Schoen.
Schoen and colleagues will conduct a cluster-randomized controlled trial of the STEPSS intervention. Through the STEPSS intervention, teachers receive four days of professional learning opportunities to increase their knowledge of statistics and support implementation of curriculum materials that have been vetted and published by the American Statistical Association in their classrooms.
Teachers in the STEPSS intervention receive the teacher's guide for a set of 12 lesson plans that are designed to teach all the benchmarks in the course descriptions for seventh-grade mathematics. They also receive class sets of consumable student booklets for the curriculum replacement unit and other materials that are necessary to implement the lessons. Teachers in the STEPSS program also participate in 4 days of professional development workshops designed to support implementation of the curriculum resources.
The American Statistical Association—one of the project partners—will provide access to their curriculum materials free of charge and assist with dissemination of findings. To support further replication and scaleup efforts, the curriculum unit will be provided for schools to use and download, free of charge, through the American Statistical Association, along with a list of the qualifications of workshop leaders and a detailed agenda for the teacher workshops.
The Institute of Education Sciences (IES) funded a previous randomized controlled trial of the STEPSS program through the Regional Educational Laboratory—Southeast. That previous study examined the impact of the STEPSS program on classroom instruction and student understanding of statistics in 40 Broward County, Florida, middle schools.
“There has been only one randomized controlled trial of the current leading ideas in statistics education so far,” said Schoen. “The results of that study were promising, and this replication study will examine whether the positive effects observed in the previous randomized controlled trial are found in other settings.”
2025 Update
In 2024, LSI was awarded a four-year, $4 million grant by the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences to run the Supporting Teacher Enactment of the Probability and Statistics Standards (STEPSS)–Replication study. The study involves collaboration with 18 partner districts in Florida, including the Northeast Florida Educational Consortium (a consortium of rural school districts) and the American Statistical Association.
Through the STEPSS intervention, teachers receive four days of professional learning opportunities to increase their knowledge of statistics and support implementation of curriculum materials that have been vetted and published by the America Statistical Association in their classrooms.
Teachers also receive a teacher's guide for a set of 12 lesson plans, designed to cover all the benchmarks outlined in the course descriptions for seventh-grade mathematics. They receive class sets of consumable student booklets for the curriculum replacement unit, as well as other necessary materials to implement the lessons.
2026 Update
This was the second year of the Supporting Teacher Enactment of the Probability and Statistics Standards (STEPSS)–Replication study, which is funded by the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences. The STEPSS-Replication study investigates the efficacy of a curriculum replacement unit in statistics on teachers, teaching, and students using a randomized controlled trial. The study was preregistered in the Open Science Framework registry this year. A measure of mathematics teacher attitudes toward teaching statistics, called the Statistics Teaching Attitudes Questionnaire (STAQ), was developed and validated this year. STAQ will enable the investigation of the impact of the STEPSS program on teachers' attitudes and how those attitudes may influence their instructional practice. To better understand the context in which the experimental study was conducted, the team surveyed more than 500 Florida mathematics teachers to learn about their instructional practices in statistics, their attitudes toward teaching statistics, and their participation in professional learning opportunities in mathematics and statistics. These efforts are the subject of several manuscripts submitted for peer review, presentations at state, national, and international conferences.