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Since the mid-80s, the International Commission on Mathematical Instruction, ICMI (http://www.mathunion.org/ICMI/) has found it important to involve itself directly in the identification and investigation of issues or topic of particular significance to the theory or practice of contemporary mathematics education, and to invest an effort in mounting specific ICMI studies on these themes.
At the same time, in the past three decades a statistics education research community has developed, linking people from various background (statisticians involved in teaching statistics in service courses at University, mathematics educators, and psychologists), leading to the creation of the International Association for Statistical Education (IASE, http://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/~iase/) in 1991.
Conversations between ICMI and the IASE made clear the common interest in organising a joint Study related to current problems in teaching of statistics within school mathematics. This interest arose from the fact that, in spite of recommendations to increase the presence of statistics teaching at school level, students reach University with a very poor level in statistics. This impedes their progress in learning very basic inferential statistics at University and is causing a general misuse and misunderstanding of statistics by researchers and professionals, with serious consequences in all areas of human activity.
This invitation made by ICMI was accepted by the IASE, which in turn made the suggestion to collapse this study with its next Round Table Conference to be held in 2008 before or after the International Congress ICME-11 (Monterrey, Mexico).
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