Statistical thinking focuses on properties that belong not to individual data values but to the entire aggregate. We analyse students' statements from 3 different sources to explore possible building blocks of the idea of data as aggregate and speculate on how young students go about putting these ideas together. We identify 4 general perspectives that students use in working with data, which in addition to an aggregate perspective include regarding data as pointers, as case values, and as classifiers. Some students seem inclined to view data from one of these 3 alternative perspectives, which then influences the types of questions they ask, the representations they generate or prefer, the interpretations they give to notions such as the average, and the conclusions they draw from the data.
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