Learning goals: The primacy of statistical knowledge.

Amongst researchers of statistics education and statistics educators alike, statistical literacy, statistical reasoning and statistical thinking have gained prominence as important learning goals for the teaching of statistics. Careful examination of the three concepts shows that considerable disagreement on their definition still exists, creating problems in the attempts to develop valid and useful measurement instruments. It is argued that the fuzziness of the three constructs stems from the fact that their conception was not motivated by empirical regularities in need of explanation, but rather by the desire to create new perspectives on the future development of statistics education. The inherent ambiguity of the three concepts makes them unsuitable as learning goals for statistics education. By focussing on different aspects of statistical knowledge, however, the intended differentiation in meaningful learning goals can be met in a less disputable way.