Abstract

Transnumeration, understood as the change of representation systems to generate new knowledge, is a fundamental part of the desirable statistical literacy as a result of schooling. Because professional practice of Primary Education prospective teachers regarding to statistical education will depend on their statistical reasoning, an evaluation is considered necessary to indicate whether an educational reinforcement in their current training is relevant. In this work, statistical literacy is evaluated through the analysis of transnumeration in a sample of 653 prospective teachers of Primary Education. For this purpose, five news extracted from different media containing information represented by simple statistical graphs that present biases are provided and the information is requested to be represented in three different ways to facilitate its interpretation: a table, another type of graph and another representation of the data. The results show a great transnumerative capacity from the graphic to the tabular format (underlining that no new information is extracted in this procedure), a limited ability to change the representation from a graphic to another type of graphic and an almost null ability to determine other different ways of synthesizing the information shown. These findings emphasize the relevance of an educational reinforcement that helps these future professionals to understand the intuitive representations that facilitate the understanding of the information and make the change between the available data presentation options, highlighting the statistical information present in these.