Practitioners and teachers should be able to justify their chosen techniques by taking<br>into account research results: This is evidence-based practice (EBP). We argue that,<br>specifically, statistical practice and statistics education should be guided by evidence,<br>and we propose statistical cognition (SC) as an integration of theory, research, and<br>application to support EBP. SC is an interdisciplinary research field, and a way of<br>thinking. We identify three facets of SC - normative, descriptive, and prescriptive -<br>and discuss their mutual influences. Unfortunately, the three components are studied<br>by somewhat separate groups of scholars, who publish in different journals. These<br>separations impede the implementation of EBP. SC, however, integrates the facets<br>and provides a basis for EBP in statistical practice and education.
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