In this reflective paper, we explore students' local and global thinking about informal<br>statistical inference through our observations of 10- to 11-year-olds, challenged to<br>infer the unknown configuration of a virtual die, but able to use the die to generate as<br>much data as they felt necessary. We report how they tended to focus on local<br>changes in the frequency or relative frequency as the sample size grew larger. They<br>generally failed to recognise that larger samples provided stability in the aggregated<br>proportions, not apparent when the data were viewed from a local perspective. We<br>draw on Mason's theory of the Structure of Attention to illuminate our observations,<br>and attempt to reconcile differing notions of local and global thinking.
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