Providing tasks that enable teachers to understand how students are processing concepts allows teachers to shape instruction, plan, adapt, and differentiate, depending on what students need to learn. What does this look like when teaching statistics? This paper presents background on formative assessment and describes a framework for thinking about how it can be enacted in practice. The framework is illustrated by focusing on the nature of statistical tasks that can elicit information about student thinking and on instructional strategies that deliberately provoke such information. The discussion is grounded in work with students in middle school, pre-service mathematics education, and in-service elementary teachers, describing the challenges and dilemmas that arose and the strategies employed to overcome these challenges.
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