This paper is from Session 8B: Research on developing students’ statistical reasoning at secondary and tertiary levels

which comes under Topic 8: Research in statistics education

Other papers under session 8B ... 8B1: Inferential reasoning: learning to “make a call” in theory 8B2: Inferential reasoning: learning to “make a call” in practice 8B3: Developing tertiary-level students’ statistical thinking through...

(Thursday 15th, 14:00-16:00)

Students’ statistical reasoning about distribution across grade levels: a look from middle school through graduate school

Presenter

• Jennifer Noll (Portland State University, United States)

Co-authors

• Mike Shaughnessy (National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, United States)
• Matthew Ciancetta (California State University – Chico, United States)

Abstract

This paper provides a synthesis of the findings from three studies that investigated students’ statistical reasoning about distributions of data and sampling distributions. Each study presented some of the same open-ended statistical tasks to students from different populations: middle school, high school, undergraduate or graduate students. The authors observed that students across all grade levels experienced difficulty in coordinating multiple aspects of a distribution. We will discuss two of the significant obstacles observed: lack of proportional reasoning skills when comparing different distributions, and difficulties in managing the natural tension between sampling variability and sample representativeness. Our research findings suggest that students throughout the grade levels need more opportunities to reason about empirical sampling distributions.

Other papers under session 8B ... 8B1: Inferential reasoning: learning to “make a call” in theory 8B2: Inferential reasoning: learning to “make a call” in practice 8B3: Developing tertiary-level students’ statistical thinking through...