A study to investigate students' facility with proportions has been undertaken by the author and Fay Sharples of the University of Waikato in New Zealand over the period 1989 to 1992. The initial study was done during 1989 and 1990 and 64 students at the University of Waikato and 57 at Brunel University in the UK took part. Some results of this study have been reported elsewhere. We made some changes to our questionnaire after studying the results of the initial study. In the Spring of 1992, 127 students in New Zealand and 29 students in the UK, all of whom were taking statistics as a service course, completed the revised version of the questionnaire. As with the previous study, the results in this follow-up were interesting and not always what we expected. This paper discusses the results on three questions.
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