Curriculum change and the ready access to school level appropriate statistical software has seen the focus of statistical practice for novice statisticians move from primarily constructing graphs and calculating statistics to describing and reasoning from distributions. Many multi-faceted concepts and statistical ideas underpin distributions,…

This is the fourth in a series of statistical articles for mathematics teachers. In this article, the authors discuss topics in General Mathematics in Unit 2 Topic 1 (Univariate data analysis and the statistical investigation process) and topics in Essential Mathematics, Unit 2 Topic 1 (Representing and comparing data).

This study is an exploration of teachers' engagement with concepts embedded in the normal distribution. The participants were a group of 290 in-service teachers enrolled in a teacher development program. The research instrument was an assessment task that can be described as an "unknown percentage" problem, which required the application…

This article studies various holiday distributions, the most interesting one being Easter. Gauss' Easter algorithm and Microsoft Excel are used to determine that the Easter distribution can be closely approximated by the convolution of two well-known uniform distributions. (Contains 8 figures.)

This paper is a personal exploration of where the ideas of "distribution" that we are trying to develop in students come from and are leading to, how they fit together, and where they are important and why. We need to have such considerations in the back of our minds when designing learning experiences. The notion of "distribution" as a lens…

Responds to an earlier article by the same title in Mathematics in School; v25 n2. Asks the question, Which diagram communicates the nature of the distribution most effectively? Uses debate about the number of angels that can balance on a pin head to illustrate various statistical diagrams and explains problems inherent in each. Concludes with…

Provides an algorithm for determining the median and quartiles of discrete data sets. Describes the graphical equivalent of the numerical method. (JM)

Reviews the use of chi-square statistics for goodness of fit. Examines how to help students relate their earlier work with independence to the use of chi-square statistics. (KHR)

Presents noncalculus approximation techniques for two normal distribution problems. These methods may be useful projects for lower-level undergraduate statistics and computer science students. (PK)

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…