Assessing conceptual change in learning statistics

StatPlay, our mulimedia for introductory statistics, aims to promote understanding of fundamental concepts. We describe assessment of students' use of StatPlay's Sampling Playground for learning about sampling variability, standard error and sampling distributuions. Students worked with StatPlay's interactive simulations, and undertook a range of prediction, estimation, labelling and explanation tasks. Results suggest that variability, and that confrontation with prior misconceptions and experience with the results of repated sampling can be valuable, in particular for understanding standard error.