Statistical communication has become a larger part of statistics pedagogy during the previous decade, particularly for those students who are majoring in the discipline. Students in servicing courses may have less opportunity to develop statistical communication skills, as they usually take only a small number of statistics subjects: it is this group that forms the basis of our present study. Based on analysis of the discourse in interview transcripts, we highlight an interesting disjunction: many students seem to be able to communicate their understanding of statistics to the interviewer, but their statements about their statistical communication imply that they are unaware that they are communicating statistically during this process. We briefly explore the pedagogical implications of our findings.
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