Statistical Graph Interpretation Skills among Pre Service Teachers

Statistical graphs have been widely used as the medium to spread information to the public. Therefore, the Ministry of Education is emphasizing on this topic as early as Standard 3. The learning process regarding this topic have been continuously done up to university level. There were various parts of study in statistics lesson with one of it was on statistical graph which mostly focused on the interpretation skills. Therefore, statistical graph interpretation skills among the teachers have been highly demanded to help them while conducting their lessons on this topic. This study had been conducted to look at how pre service teachers interpret a bar graph represented to them. At the same time, we have looked at how the participants did their interpretations based on the mean value which was also given in the questions. In order to fulfil our objectives we conducted 30 to 45 minutes interview sessions with five participants. All of our participants are pre service teachers who are at their last year of their studies at one of teachers training college (IPG) in Malaysia. An interview session was done personally with each one of them. Based on our findings, we have determined that there are four graphs interpretation skills that had been used when our participants did their interpretation of a bar graph given. We have also determined that the participants of this study have understood the effect of mean value to the set of data represented by the given bar graph. This proves that all of them did not face too much problem while doing the graph interpretations. At the same time, our participants could also determine the impact of outliers to the mean value of the data.