For many years, students have been taught to visualise data by drawing graphs. Recently, there has been a growing trend to teach statistics, particularly statistical concepts, using interactive and dynamic visualisation tools. Free down-loadable teaching and simulation software designed specifically for schools, and more general data visualisation…

People forget what they do not use. But attitudes "stick." Our article emphasizes the importance of students' attitudes toward statistics. We examine 15 surveys that purport to assess these attitudes and then describe the "Survey of Attitudes Toward Statistics," a commonly used attitude survey. We present our conceptual model of Students'…

Qualitative methods have become common in statistics education research, but questions linger about their role in scholarship. Currently, influential policy documents lend credence to the notion that qualitative methods are inherently inferior to quantitative ones. In this paper, several of the questions about qualitative research raised in recent…

Our research in statistical cognition uses both qualitative and quantitative methods. A mixed method approach makes our research more comprehensive, and provides us with new directions, unexpected insights, and alternative explanations for previously established concepts. In this paper, we review four statistical cognition studies that used mixed…

Statistics education in psychology often falls disappointingly short of its goals. The increasing use of qualitative approaches in statistics education research has extended and enriched our understanding of statistical cognition processes, and thus facilitated improvements in statistical education and practices. Yet conceptual analysis, a…

Informal inferential reasoning has shown some promise in developing students' deeper understanding of statistical processes. This paper presents a framework to think about three key principles of informal inference--generalizations "beyond the data," probabilistic language, and data as evidence. The authors use primary school classroom episodes…

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…

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…

This article discusses five papers focused on "Research on Reasoning about Variation and Variability", by Hammerman and Rubin, Ben-Zvi, Bakker, Reading, and Gould, which appeared in a special issue of the "Statistics Education Research Journal" (No. 3(2) November 2004). Three issues emerged from these papers. First, there is a link between the…

This article is a discussion of and reaction to two collections of papers on research on Reasoning about Variation: Five papers appeared in November 2004 in a Special Issue 3(2) of the Statistics Education Research Journal (by Hammerman and Rubin, Ben-Zvi, Bakker, Reading, and Gould), and three papers appear in a Special Section on the same topic…

This paper describes a classroom teaching experiment, concerning the concept of probability, with children aged 5 in a kindergarten school. The teaching experiment was based on constructivist and interactionist theories about the learning of school mathematics and lasted one month. The collection of the information was based on the tape-recorded…

New software tools for data analysis provide rich opportunities for representing and understanding data. However, little research has been done on how learners use these tools to think about data, nor how that affects teaching. This paper describes several ways that learners use new software tools to deal with variability in analyzing data,…