Interpretation of Summaries on Statistics Addressed to Prospective Teachers in Middle School

The aim of this work was assessing the interpretation of statistical summaries carried out by prospective secondary and high school teachers. We analyse the responses by 65 students in the Master of Teacher Education, specialty of Mathematics, to two tasks. In the first task they should interpret the mean, median, mode, minimum, maximum, quartiles and standard deviation in a data distribution; in the second task, they have to select the most representative average using the same statistical summaries and a box plot. The interpretation of statistics, the selected average and the participants' justifications were generally correct, and we obtained better results than in previous research with students and prospective primary school teachers. However, we observe some conflicts on the meaning of the interpreted statistics, which should be overcome to assure a good teaching performance in their professional future.