This study was concerned with finding what characteristics of data, such as direction of skewness, degree of skewness and degree of kurtosis, affected students' ability to use histograms and boxplots for detecting non-symmetry in the parent population. The study found that while there was no consistent difference between boxplots and histograms in the proportion of students detecting skewness when the data was displayed in a left-skewed orientation, the direction of skewness did have a significant effect, with more students detecting skewness when the same data was displayed in a right-skewed orientation. This results is consistent with research reported in the psychological literature where many, but not all, studies have shown an over emphasis on the left hand field of view for normal subjects. Other findings of the study are given and suggestions for further research made.
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