While various studies suggest that informal statistical inference (ISI) can be developed by young students, more research is needed to translate this claim into a well-founded learning trajectory (LT). As a contribution, this paper presents the results of a cycle of design research that focuses on the design, implementation, and evaluation of the…

Drawing inference from data is an important skill for students to understand their everyday life, so that the sampling distribution as a central topic in statistical inference is necessary to be learned by the students. However, little is known about how to teach the topic for high school students, especially in Indonesian context. Therefore, the…

The goal of this article is to introduce the topic of "learning to reason from samples," which is the focus of this special issue of "Educational Studies in Mathematics" on "statistical reasoning." Samples are data sets, taken from some wider universe (e.g., a population or a process) using a particular procedure…

In the present study we analyze how students reason about or make inferences given a particular hypothesis testing problem (without having studied formal methods of statistical inference) when using Fathom. They use Fathom to create an empirical sampling distribution through computer simulation. It is found that most student´s reasoning rely on…

Sampling tasks and sampling distributions provide a fertile realm for investigating students' conceptions of variability. A project-designed teaching episode on samples and sampling distributions was team-taught in 6 research classrooms (2 middle school and 4 high school) by the investigators and regular classroom mathematics teachers. Data…

In this article we describe a semester-long project, based on the popular video game series Guitar Hero, designed to introduce upper-level undergraduate statistics students to statistical research. Some of the goals of this project are to help students develop statistical thinking that allows them to approach and answer open-ended research…

Using Microsoft Excel, several interactive, computerized learning modules are developed to demonstrate the Central Limit Theorem. These modules are used in the classroom to enhance the comprehension of this theorem. The Central Limit Theorem is a very important theorem in statistics, and yet because it is not intuitively obvious, statistics…

Distinguishes two conceptions of sample and sampling that emerged in the context of a teaching experiment conducted in a high school statistics class. Suggests that the conception of a sample as a quasi- proportional, small-scale version of the population is a powerful one to target for instruction. (Author/KHR)

Alphabet Math is an investigation of the order of usage of letters in the alphabet. Children collect individual data then compare and interpret it to make inferences. The inferences are compared to analyses of larger samples. How this is done is described. (MT)

There is much research that documents what many teachers know, that students struggle with many concepts in probability and statistics. This article presents two sample activities the authors use to help preservice teachers develop ideas about how they can use technology to promote their students' ability to understand mathematics and connect…

Presents teaching activities that are intended to be used to teach statistics to students in a high school mathematics program. Includes a worksheet of eight discussion questions on statistics, four activities on sampling bias, two experiments on sampling techniques, and a game known as "capture-recapture." (TW)

Variation is a key concept in the study of statistics and its understanding is a crucial aspect of most statistically related tasks. This study aimed to extend and apply a hierarchy for describing students' understanding of variation that was developed in a sampling context to the context of a natural event in which variation occurs. Students aged…