Solving problems is not enough: Assessing and diagnosing the ways in which students organise statistical concepts

This paper provides a conceptual framework for generating assessment tasks which provide an instructor with a richer description of students' thinking and reasoning than is possible by just giving students problems to solve. Although the framework is general, its application is illustrated with material from college and beginning graduate level pre-calculus introductory statistics courses which focuses on the following topics: sampling, interval estimation, point estimation, and hypothesis testing.