In the past, K-12 mathematics students' exposure to statistical concepts has been rather impoverished, consisting primarily of measures of center-mean, median, mode-and perhaps some graphical representations of data. Both the Curriculum and Evaluation Standards (NCTM, 1989) and the Principles and Standards for School Mathematics (NCTM, 2000) advocate for a much wider and deeper role for statistics in school mathematics, including reasoning about data in context and making data-based decisions. An understanding of the role of variability in various contexts-e.g., in sampling, in data sets, and in probability experiments-is one of the critical components students need for statistical reasoning. The research reported here on students' conceptions of variability is part of a three-year NSF grant The Development of Secondary Students' Conceptions of Variability (Shaughnessy, 2003).
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