Over the past decade there has been an increasingly strong call for statistics education to focus more on statistical literacy, reasoning, and thinking. One of the main arguments presented is that traditional approaches to teaching statistics focus on skills, procedures, and computations, which do not lead students to reason or think statistically. This book explores the challenge posed to educators at all levels-how to develop the desired learning goals for students by focusing on current research studies that examine the nature and development of statistical literacy, reasoning, and thinking. We begin this introductory chapter with an overview of the reform movement in statistics education that has led to the focus on these learning outcomes. Next, we offer some preliminary definitions and distinctions for these often poorly defined and overlapping terms. We then describe some of the unique issues addressed by each chapter and conclude with some summary comments and implications.
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