Emergence of reasoning about sampling among young students in the context of informal inferential reasoning

This paper discusses students’ evolving statistical reasoning about randomness and sampling in the context of inquiry-based activities designed to develop their informal inferential reasoning (IIR). The knowledge of sampling and randomness are key concepts to understanding statistical inference (Garfield & Ben-Zvi, 2008). In the ‘Connections’ project (Ben-Zvi, Gil & Apel, 2007), sixth grade students were engaged in an inquiry-based learning environment using TinkerPlots (Konold & Miller, 2005) that was designed to develop their IIR. In this design experiment (Brown, 1992; Collins, 1992), the students’ intuitive concepts of sampling and randomness were used to design instructional activities that nurture the emergence of ideas of random vs. biased sample and inference. This knowledge was later applied by the students to investigate authentic data and draw informal statistical inferences from a random sample to a population.