Researchers have documented many misconceptions students hold about sampling variability. This study takes a different approach--instead of identifying shortcomings, we consider the productive reasoning pieces students construct as they reason about sampling distributions. We interviewed eight undergraduate students newly enrolled in an…

The ability to interpret graphs is highly important in modern society, but has proven to be a challenge for many people. In this paper, two teaching methods were used to remediate one specific misinterpretation: the area misinterpretation of box plots. First, we used refutational text to explicitly state and invalidate the area misinterpretation…

Information on the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Southern Africa is often interpreted through a veil of secrecy and shame and, I argue, with flawed understanding of basic statistics. This research determined the levels of statistical literacy evident in 316 future Mathematical Literacy teachers' explanations of the median in the context of HIV/AIDS…

This article points out an unexpected but common misconception by students dealing with the exponential distribution.

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…