We examined how middle school students reason about results from a computer-simulated die-tossing experiment, including various representations of data, to support or refute an assumption that the outcomes on a die are equiprobable. We used students' actions with the software and their social interactions to infer their expectations and whether or not they believed their empirical data could be used to refute an assumption of equiprobable outcomes. Comparisons across students illuminate intricacies in their reasoning as they collect and analyze data from the die tosses. Overall, our research contributes to understanding how students can engage in informal hypothesis testing and use data from simulations to make inferences about a probability distribution.
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