Teaching Students the Stochastic Nature of Statistical Concepts in an Introductory Statistics Course

The article argues that the persistence of student difficulties in reasoning about the stochastic, despite significant reform efforts, might be the result of the continuing impact of the formalist mathematical tradition, affecting instructional approaches and curricula and acting as a barrier to instruction that provides students with the skills necessary to recognize uncertainty and variability in the real world. It describes a study driven by the conjecture that the reform movement would have been more successful in achieving its objectives if it were to put more emphasis on helping students build sound intuitions about variation. It provides an overview of how the conjecture guiding the study was developed and linked to classroom practice, and briefly discusses the experiences and insights gained from a teaching experiment in a college level, introductory statistics classroom, which adopted a nontraditional approach to statistics instruction with variation at its core. By contrasting students' intuitions about the stochastic prior to instruction to their stochastical reasoning at the completion of the course, it illustrates the potential of the instructional approach as an alternative to more conventional instruction.