Literature Index

This article describes how a spreadsheet-based tool can be used to provide personalized statistics homework exercises for each student in a class.

The paper describes 7th graders' cooperative work on a data assessment task in a computer-assisted environment. The task was administered at the end of a carefully designed Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) course. The purpose of the study is to assess students' ability to make sense of data and their representations: a) use of data analysis skills, and understanding of basic statistical procedures and concepts; b) if and how they adopted the dispositions and points of view of certain aspects of the EDA culture. The "local-global lens" is used to assess students' formulation of research questions and hypotheses, and use and interpretation of data representations.

Despite considerable research having been done in the area of sex differences in mathematical ability, statistical ability has rarely been the subject of a major research effort. This study focuses on the question of whether there are sex differences in statistical reasoning for college students. Participants included 245 college students in Taiwan and 267 American college students. The Statistical Reasoning Assessment (SRA) was used in this cross-cultural study to assess students' statistical reasoning ability. While the original version of the test was administered to students in the United States, a Chinese version of the instrument was administered to participants in Taiwan. Statistical methods were used to ascertain whether there were mean differences between males and females and whether there was equality between the correlation matrices for males and females. All the analysis were based on both the correct reasoning scores and the misconception scores obtained from the SRA instrument. Results tend to support the general research findings that when sex differences appear, they are in the direction favoring males, particularly in higher cognitive task such as mathematical reasoning. Analysis of the correlation matrices suggests that there are no differences in statistical reasoning between males and females for both countries. However, it should be noted that the results may be due to low item intercorrelations.

In recent years, three key documents have been influential in focusing attention on statistics and data analysis in the Pre-K-12 mathematics curriculum in the United States. We examine how these three documents come together with a collective potential to shape the future direction of Pre-K-12 statistics education, and we describe the specific contributions made by the document Guidelines for Assessment and Instruction in Statistics Education (GAISE) Report: A Pre-K-12 Curriculum Framework.