Student understanding of statistics: Developing the concept of distribution

In the past decade, various countries have produced national mathematics eudcation reform documents that recommend that students learn to produce, explore and interpert disctributions of data meaningfully. The purpose of this study is to expand on what has been learned about student notions of the average as a represeentation of a distribution. For this paper we report interview data with Jim, a middle school student. We followed the investigation of Mokros and Russell (1995) and their framework for understanding how children develop an understanding of the concept of mean. Jim did not seem to fall clearly into any one of the strategy types identified by Mokros and Russell. His problem solving strategies for finding the mean seem to vary, but at the same time he maintains a consistent interest in making sense of the results of his computations. Jim did not appear to make sense of the mean as a statistical measure of a distribution.