As an extension to an activity introducing Year 5 students to the practice of statistics, the software "TinkerPlots" made it possible to collect repeated random samples from a finite population to informally explore students' capacity to begin reasoning with a distribution of sample statistics. This article provides background for the…

To capture aspects of pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) not illuminated in an earlier written survey, an interview protocol was used with 40 middle school teachers. The scenarios were intended to elicit teachers' understanding of the big ideas, ability to anticipate students' answers, and intervention strategies for the classroom. This was…

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…