A recent trend in school mathematics has been to launch student inquiry with real-world contexts that capture student interest and intrigue (Meyer 2011, 2012; Kane 2015). Often these starting points harness the immediacy and power of the Internet to provide strong visuals and timely relevance. The goal of the resulting student inquiry is to foster…

This article presents two statistical tasks, one on comparing data sets, another on repeated sampling, both of which have powerful connections to proportional reasoning. Students' work and reasoning on these tasks are included, as well as suggestions for ways to use these tasks with middle school students to connect statistical thinking to…