This paper is from Session 8E: Theory and Frameworks
which comes under Topic 8: New approaches to research in statistics education
Paper 8E1 (Tuesday 10th, 16:00-17:30)
Use of the focusing framework for characterizing students’ foci of attention when reasoning about data distributions
Presenter
- Luis Saldanha (Université du Québec à Montréal, Canada)
Co-author
- Mathieu Thibault (Université du Québec à Montréal, Canada)
Abstract
This research highlights our use of the focusing framework (Lobato et al., 2013) as a new lens for exploring students’ actual foci of attention and ways of reasoning in the context of statistics instruction intended to orient their focus and reasoning to specific ideas. We present results of our analysis of ideas expressed by ninth-grade students as they participated in an instructional sequence involving the use of TinkerPlots software to organize univariate data samples, and designed to orient students’ attention to variability when making an inference about the sampled population. Students’ written responses and surrounding classroom discussions analyzed in terms of the focusing framework highlight and explain the uniformity and diversity of their reasoning when comparing distributions.