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…

We propose a nonparametric (or distribution-free) procedure for testing the equality of several population variances (or scale parameters). The proposed test is a modification of Bakir's (1989, Commun. Statist., Simul-Comp., 18, 757-775) analysis of means by ranks (ANOMR) procedure for testing the equality of several population means. A proof is…

This paper presents a summary of action research investigating statistics students' understandings of the sampling distribution of the mean. With four sections of an introductory Statistics in Education course (n=98 students), a computer simulation activity (R. delMas, J. Garfield, and B. Chance, 1999) was implemented and evaluated to show…