Literature Index

The approach presented here is based on the following general notions about forecasting. First, that most predictions and forecasts contain an irreducible intuitive component. Second, that the intuitive predictions of knowledgeable individuals contain much useful information. Third, that these intuitive judgments are often biased in a predictable manner. Hence, the problem is not whether to accept intuitive predictions at face value or to reject them, but rather how they can be debiased and improved.

Individual thinking is driven by intuitions which have nearly no counterpart in the concepts which one learns from theory. This is especially true for stochastics teaching and is the main cause that is not very effective. The author reports about powerful strategies that might bridge the gap between individual intuitions and formal concepts. This gives a clear insight into difficult concepts and changes the behaviour of the learners.

Activities that promote student invention can appear inefficient, because students do not generate canonical solutions, and therefore the students may perform badly on standard assessments. Two studies on teaching descriptive statistics to 9th-grade students examined whether invention activities may prepare students to learn. Study 1 found that invention acitivities, when coupled with subsequent learning resources like lectures, led to strong gains in procedural skills, insight into formulas, and abilities to evaluate data form an argument. Additional, an embedded assessment experiment crossed the facets of instructional method by type of transfer test, with 1 test including resources for learning and 1 not. A "tell-and-practice" instructional condition led to the same transfer results as an invention condition when there was no learning resource, but the invention condition did better than the tell-and-practice condition when there was a learning resource. This demonstrates the value of invention activities for future learning from resources, and the value of assessments that include opportunities to learn during a tests. In Study 2, classroom teachers implemented the instruction and replicated the results. The studies demonstrate that intuitively compelling student-centered activities can be both pedagogically tractable and effective at preparing students to learn.,

The ability to analyse qualitative information from quantitative information, and/or to create<br>new information from qualitative and quantitative information is the key task of statistical literacy in the<br>21st century. Although several studies have focussed on critical evaluation of statistical information, this<br>aspect of research has not been clearly conceptualised as yet. This paper presents a hierarchy of the<br>graphical interpretation component of statistical literacy. 175 participants from different educational levels<br>(junior high school to graduate students) responded to a questionnaire and some of them were also<br>interviewed. The SOLO Taxonomy was used for coding the students' responses and the Rasch model was<br>used to clarify the construction of the hierarchy. Five different levels of interpretations of graphs were<br>identified: Idiosyncratic, Basic graph reading, Rational/Literal, Critical, and Hypothesising and Modelling.<br>These results will provide guidelines for teaching statistical literacy.