Counting noses and scary things: Children construct their ideas about data

At every point in their development, students are engaged in serious intellectual work as they attempt to construct their own understanding of the world and their relation to it. As part of this work, they are immersed in mathematical ideas which are just at the edge of their understanding. In this paper, I will first discuss the nature of the mathematics in which the child in the primary grades can engage in the context of data analysis, and then give some examples of children's work in this area to illustrate how young children must construct for themselves key processes which are the building blocks of collecting, describing, and interpreting data.