This article contains stories from several grades K-5 classrooms used to illustrate the importance of children assuming a critical orientation toward data displays. Some of these critical attitudes stem from students questioning the question, examining what the data do not say, analyzing the categories for the data, and identifying the background knowledge and experience of the sample population.
This article will address some issues involved in shifting away from teaching statistics as a collection of techniques and tools toward what can be called a more authentic approach that involves genuine problem solving and reasoning with data.
This article reports on a subset of a larger study that addresses students' probabilistic thinking; the focus here is on students' thinking to three tasks involving coins. As well there are also highlights of the associated interview dialogues between the teacher-researcher and the students.
This article is based on research with students in grades 3 to 9 and is concerned with a model that tracks the steps in the development of students' understandings of probabilistic and statistical concepts over time.
This article describes the project "A Statistical Study of Generations" that attempts to engage high school students and also teach sound mathematical and statistical reasoning. Some evidence is presented that students' were disposed to view mathematics as "sensible, useful, and doable".
This article focuses on the ideas on what it means to "do statistics", and the important ideas used for data analysis, namely characterizing the shape of data distributions and their variability and center.
The purpose of this article is to share the insights gained from implementing a task using Probability Explorer with sixth-grade students as they learned to draw inferences form empirical data. Features of the task that elicit and extend students' reasoning are described and evidence is provided on what exemplifies the notion of "compelling evidence" amongst middle grade students.
This article considers some of the methods the experimenter has for managing planned, systematic variability, chance like variability and unplanned, systematic variability in the context of an example. The methods used are control, randomization, replication, and blocking.
This article describes a teaching study with fifth- and sixth-grade students in which they explored some of issues involved in critically examining data such as questioning the underlying assumptions. Students generated their own mathematical models as a way of understanding a real-life situation.
This article describes some internet-based projects using real data produced and collected from students in the United Kingdom and elsewhere. We believe that these projects enable students to understand better the reasons for data collection and ad a dimension to their learning.