In recent years there has been increased attention within both the research and teaching communities of mathematics education to using student work and student thinking to obtain clues about how students develop and construct their mathematical knowledge. Teachers and researchers in statistics education have also begun to look more closely at student work and student thinking on statistics tasks, in order to gain better insights into what their students know about statistical concepts. In this plenary talk I will share some excerpts of Grade 6 - 12 students' thinking and reasoning on several statistical tasks that were designed to probe for students' understandings of variability in data sets and in distributions. Task based interviews on data sets presented to our students in both graphical and tabular form that can provide us with roadmaps to for curriculum decisions to enrich our students' statistical growth whatever their level may be.
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