Students’ emergent articulations of models and modeling in making informal statistical inferences

A fundamental aspect of statistical inference is representing real world data with statistical models. This paper analyzes students’ articulations of statistical models and modeling during their first steps in making informal statistical inferences (ISIs). An integrated modeling approach (IMA) was designed and implemented to help students understand the relationship between sample and population, and reasoning about models and modeling. In this case study, we explore the articulations made by three pairs of primary school students about what a model is and how they use models to understand random samples and make ISIs.