"Do versicolor flowers tend to be longer than verginica flowers?" How experts and novices visually inspect and then interpret graphs

Authors: 
Khalil, K.I., & Konold, C.
Type: 
Proceedings
Category: 
Research
Volume: 
3
Pages: 
1341-1342
Year: 
2002
Publisher: 
In Proceedings of the twenty-fourth annual meeting of the North American Chapter of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education
Abstract: 

In this experiment, we investigate the correspondence between how graph-readers visually inspect a graph to answer a comparison question about two groups and the justifications they offer. We recorded how people visually inspected graphs using a device that restricted how much data they could see at any given time. Students offered a variety of justifications for why two groups differed (e.g., slices, cut-points, modal clumps), and these appear to correspond to how they visually parsed 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