Principles of Instructional Design for Supporting the Development of Students' Statistical Reasoning

This chapter proposes design principles for developing statistical reasoning in elementary school. In doing so, we will draw on a classroom design experiment that we conducted several years ago in the United States with 12-year-old students that focused on the analysis of univariate data. Experiments of this type involve tightly integrated cycles of instructional design and the analysis of students' learning that feeds back to inform the revision of the design. To ground the proposed design principles, we first give a short overview of the classroom design experiment and then frame it as a paradigm case in which to tease out design principles that address five aspects of the classroom environment that proved critical in supporting the students' statistical learning:<br>o The focus on central statistical ideas<br>o The instructional activities<br>o The classroom activity structure<br>o The computer-based tools the students used<br>o The classroom discourse