Secondary students’ abilities to prepare and interpret graphics

Abstract

In this paper we present a piece of research in which we tried to ascertain to what extent secondary school students develop the skills and abilities involved in the preparation and interpretation of graphics, generally considered to be among the most important capacities students need to acquire. Results indicate that these students show significat shortcomings in creating graphics, calculating the increase between two points, extrapolating and drawing conclusions. We discuss some reasons to account for these problems and offer some suggestions that might contribute to improvement in their learning.