In this chapter we present results from research on students' reasoning about the normal distribution in a university-level introductory course. One hundred and seventeen students took part in a teaching experiment based on the use of computers for nine hours, as part of a 90-hour course. The teaching experiment took place during six class sessions. Three sessions were carried out in a traditional classroom, and in another three sessions students worked on the computer using activities involving the analysis of real data. At the end of the course students were asked to solve three open-ended tasks that involved the use of computers. Semiotic analysis of the students' written protocols as well as interviews with a small number of students were used to classify different aspects of correct and incorrect reasoning about the normal distribution used by students when solving the tasks. Examples of students' reasoning in the different categories are presented.
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