Evaluation of Basic Education teachers’ graphic literacy at training and profesional action

ABSTRACT This article presents the results of a cross-sectional descriptive research carried out in a university in south central Chile, in which teachers of Basic Education in training and in active participation, on graphic representations, due to the role they play in the teaching and learning process from the first year of Basic Education in the Chilean school curriculum. For the collection of information, an instrument validated statistically by the authors was applied, which showed a reliability (Cronbach's alpha) of 0.78, which allowed to evaluate the coding and decoding abilities of quantitative information summarized in univariate and bivariate graphical representations, making use of Kimura's taxonomy (1999), whose introduction at the school system level would generate the skills demanded by the national curriculum. The results show that, in general, teachers in training and active have high average percentages in the basic reading ability of univariate information, summarized in polygons of simple frequency. However, the percentages decrease to 61.3% in the future professors and to 50% in the professors in active, because it is a histogram, representation widely used to show the distribution of quantitative information in any course of statistics at national and international level. These results, novelty in the Chilean context, allow us to observe that the teachers in training and in active have not sufficiently developed the ability to make a joint reading of two quantitative variables summarized by means of a graphic representation, demanding innovation in the processes of instruction that guarantee an improvement in learning.