Language plays a crucial role in the classroom. The use of specialized language in a domain can cause a subject to seem more difficult to students than it actually is. When words that are part of everyday English are used differently in a domain, these words are said to have lexical ambiguity. Studies in other fields, such as mathematics and chemistry education, suggest that in order to help students learn vocabulary instructors should exploit the lexical ambiguity of the words. The study presented here is the second in a sequence of studies designed to understand the effects of and develop techniques for exploiting lexical ambiguities in statistics classrooms. In particular, this paper looks at five statistical terms and the meanings of these terms most commonly expressed by students at the end of an undergraduate statistics course.
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