Although hypothesis testing is ubiquitous in data analysis, research suggests it is commonly misunderstood. Simulation-based inference methods have potential to make student thinking visible, thus providing a valuable lens to analyze developing conceptions about inference. This paper identifies difficulties made visible through simulation-based…

This paper identifies key concepts and issues associated with the reasoning of informal statistical inference. I focus on key ideas of inference that I think all students should learn, including at secondary level as well as tertiary. I argue that a fundamental component of inference is to go beyond the data at hand, and I propose that statistical…

In this reflective paper, we explore students' local and global thinking about informal statistical inference through our observations of 10- to 11-year-olds, challenged to infer the unknown configuration of a virtual die, but able to use the die to generate as much data as they felt necessary. We report how they tended to focus on local changes…

Recent research into students' reasoning about variation refers specifically to notions of distribution that emerge. This paper reports on research where written responses, from tertiary introductory statistics students, were coded according to the level of consideration of variation. A hierarchy of reasoning about distribution is proposed, based…

Drawing conclusions from the comparison of datasets using informal statistical inference is a challenging task since the nature and type of reasoning expected is not fully understood. In this paper a secondary teacher's reasoning from the comparison of box plot distributions during the teaching of a Year 11 (15-year-old) class is analyzed. From…