This chapter reports on student performance with data and chance by examining individual 1996 NAEP items or clusters of related items and where available samples of student responses to constructed-response questions. The focus of this chapter is on four categories that are often interrelated: central tendency, reasoning with data, graphical data displays, and probability and chance. In addition to reporting and interpreting performance based on NAEP results, for some short and extended constructed-response items we also examined a set of sample student responses. This sample was not a representative sample of all responses; rather it was a convenience sample of non-blank responses. Some of the items described in this chapter were extended constructed-response tasks, a type of NAEP item that is discussed extensively in chapter 11 by Silver, Alacaci, and Stylianou.
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