This study was carried out as a preparation to the development of instruction material for statistics. The history of statistics was studied with special attention to the development of the average values: the arithmetic, geometric, harmonic mean; median, mode, and midrange. Also sampling and distribution are discussed. After an introduction on phenomenology, this article firstly discusses a so-called historical and then a didactical phenomenology of the average values.<br>The average values form a large family of notions that in early times were not yet strictly conceptions. It appears to be important that students discover many qualitative aspects of the average values before they learn how to calculate the arithmetic means and the median. From history, it is concluded that estimation, fair distribution and simple decision theory can be fruitful starting points for a statistical instruction sequence.
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