This study investigated the factors that 12th grade students in United Arab Emirates take into consideration when judging the validity of a given statistical generalization, in particular, in terms of the sample size and sample selection bias. The sample consisted of 360 students who had not studied sampling yet. Results show that a small percentage of the students take the sample size and selection bias into consideration properly. Many students based their judgment on their personal beliefs regardless of the properties of the selected sample. This study identified some pre- teaching misconceptions that students have with regard to 'sampling'. Such misconceptions are 'any sample represents the population', and, 'any sample does not represent the population'.
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