This paper is from Session 9A: The design of digital tools and technology-enhanced learning environments for teaching statistics

which comes under Topic 9: Technology in statistics education

Expressions of uncertainty when variation is partially-determined

Presenter

• Janet Ainley (University of Leicester, United Kingdom)

Co-author

• David Pratt (University of London, United Kingdom)

Abstract

Research into students’ knowledge about uncertainty has tended to focus on contexts where the variation observed might easily be attributed to randomness. Yet, the variation observable in many everyday phenomena might be seen as partially-determined, in the sense that one main factor might explain the signal in the variation but additional noise is often inexplicable and might be accounted for as random error. We set out to research how students (age 11) accounted for variation that is in this sense partially-determined. In this paper, we describe how students’ expressions of uncertainty were shaped by particular features within the activity structure in which children recorded and represented the results of their experiments and then modelled the variation.