Study of the insertion of statistical education in mathematics undergraduate curricula in public institutions in Brazil from causal inferences
The process globalization has, over time, expanded the central role that information plays in modern society. Information, most time replete with statistical and probabilistic elements, flows with great speed and volume in today’s communicative media, and it serves as a basis for importance decisions to be taken, both individually and socially. All this has influenced a new formative profile of students and teachers at national and world level, which has required them essential reading tools and statistical and probabilistic reasoning, the research field that is concerned with these new formative profiles is called Statistical Education. This study has investigated the formative problems of basic education teachers with a focus on their curricular structuring and has delineated the elements that are the causes of the current workload and number of disciplines present in Brazilian mathematics undergraduate courses in public universities and institutes. To this end, it was developed a methodology based on Causal Inference Theory in order to allow the inference of causes about the problem. This inference was based on the curricular organization of the undergraduate mathematics courses of public universities and institutes in Brazil, and the training of each teacher belonging to these courses and the existing statistical departments. There was a negative influence of the statistical departments on disciplines of statistics or probability of undergraduate mathematics courses at universities. The possible causal dynamics of the variables that influence the number of disciplines and workloads related to statistics and probability in IES were detailed.