Over the past several years, we have been working on the Reasoning Under Uncertainty (RUU) project, whose goal has been to develop and test a computer-supported environment in which high school students could learn how to think in probabilistic and statistical terms. The central ideas of the project are to use the computer as a tool for data gathering, manipulation, and display, and to have students investigate questions that are meaningful to them. In contrast to the usual emphasis in statistics courses on formulas and computational procedures, RUU emphasizes reasoning about statistical problems. We believe that students should be able to engage in statistical reasoning about uncertainties that either they or society face. Such a course conforms well to the National Research Council's suggestion that "elementary statistics and probability should now be considered fundamental for all high school students" and to the new NCTM guidelines for including probability and statistics in the elementary and secondary curriculum.
The CAUSE Research Group is supported in part by a member initiative grant from the American Statistical Association’s Section on Statistics and Data Science Education