How can ideas, techniques, and applications taken from Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) enrich mathematics instruction? How do students and teachers respond to ideas of EDA? How must EDA be transformed in order to reach a pedagogically useful position in the mathematics curriculum within general education? The paper describes some results of a teaching experiment concerning ideas of EDA. It was explored how basic new displays such as stem-and-leaf and boxplots can be taught and learned and how they have to be regarded in the context of more traditional statistical displays and newer computer supported displays. A new structuring of the cognitive tool kit for elementary data analysis is sketched. EDA is communicated to teachers and students as detective work. The paper describes ways and problems to do this and how such ideas were transformed in the classroom. Difficulties that arose with using open material and complex data sets in the classroom are discussed with an example concerning deaths in traffic accidents in west Germany from 1953-1987.
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