The findings reported in this article came from a study which took place in an introductory college-level statistics course and which adopted a nontraditional approach to statistics instruction that had variation as its central tenet. The conjecture driving the study was that poor understanding of statistical concepts might be the result of instructional neglect of variation and that instruction which puts emphasis on building student intuitions about variation and its relevance to statistics should also lead to improved comprehension of other statistical concepts. The results of the study point to a number of critical junctures and obstacles to the conceptual evolution of variation. The article discusses one of those critical junctures and obstacles, the understanding of histograms.
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