The aim of our current collaboration has been to explore concepts for an emerging framework designed to better understand the relationship between learners’ inferential reasoning in statistics and their processes of argumentation embedded mostly in context. The concepts we will present grow out of our reading of philosophy, the literature in different fields on argumentation and inference, and our experiences over several years with a wide range of students and adults involved in drawing statistical inferences. This preparatory paper is theoretical in its stance, but in our SRTL-6 presentation we will show excerpts in statistical classrooms drawn from projects by the authors at different school levels to illustrate the concepts in our emerging framework.
