Many researchers have commented on the use of metaphor in education. This thesis considers the extent to which metaphor and metaphorical language is used in the case of undergraduate statistics education.

There are many aspects of an undergraduate statistics course that employ metaphor. I will consider a typical undergraduate statistics course in terms of the following components: educational policy, educational administration, spoken lectures, statistics textbooks, assessment, and course evaluation. Metaphor is present in all these aspects, and I discuss its importance in each aspect in turn.

Although much research into tertiary mathematics education has been undertaken, only a small proportion is devoted to statistics education; and it is not clear whether statistics should be viewed as a subset of mathematics for this purpose. I discuss the extent to which insights from the study of metaphor in the teaching of mathematics are applicable to the teaching of statistics.