Our paper describes a suite of studies involving students' statistical thinking in Grades 1 through 8. In our key studies (Jones et al., 2000, Mooney, in press), we validated Frameworks that characterised students' thinking on four processes: describing, organizing, representing, and analyzing and interpreting data. These studies showed that the students' thinking was consistent with the four cognitive levels postulated in a general developmental model. We also report on two teaching experiments, with primary students (Jones et al., 2001; Wares et al., 2000) that used the Framework to inform instruction. Teaching experiment results showed that children produced fewer idiosyncratic descriptions of data, possessed intuitive knowledge of center and spread and were constrained in analysis and interpretation by knowledge of data context.
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