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…

This study investigates the relationship between deterministic and probabilistic reasoning when students experiment on a real-world situation involving uncertainty. Twelve students, aged eight to nine years, participated in an outdoor teaching activity that called for reflection on the growth of sunflowers within the frame of a sunflower lottery,…

Data distributions can be represented using different external representations, such as histograms and boxplots. Although the role of external representations has been extensively studied in mathematics, this is less the case in statistics. This study helps to fill this gap by systematically varying the representation that accompanies a task…

Many teachers of statistics recommend using real-life data during class lessons. However, there has been little systematic study of what effect this teaching method has on student engagement and learning. The present study examined this question in a first-year university statistics course. Students (n = 38) were interviewed and their reflections…

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'…

This study examined how preservice elementary teachers think about situations involving probability. Twenty-four preservice elementary teachers who had not yet studied probability as part of their preservice elementary mathematics coursework were interviewed using a task-based interview. The participants' responses showed a wide variety of…

There is growing recognition of the importance of developing young students' informal inferential reasoning (IIR). This focus on informal inference in school statistics has implications for teacher education. This study reports on 26 preservice teachers utilizing Lesson Study to support a focus on the teaching of IIR in primary classrooms.…

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…

This paper presents a qualitative case study of statistical practice in a university-based statistical consulting centre. Naturally occurring conversations and activities in the consulting sessions provided opportunities to observe questions, problems, and decisions related to selecting, using, and reporting statistics and statistical techniques…

This study seeks to describe the subject matter knowledge needed for teaching statistical association at the secondary level. Taking a practice-based qualitative approach, three experienced teachers were observed as they taught statistical association and interviewed immediately following each observation. Records of practice were assembled to…

To capture aspects of pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) not illuminated in an earlier written survey, an interview protocol was used with 40 middle school teachers. The scenarios were intended to elicit teachers' understanding of the big ideas, ability to anticipate students' answers, and intervention strategies for the classroom. This was…

Recent reforms in statistics education have initiated the need to prepare graduate teaching assistants (TAs) for these changes. A focus group study explored the experiences and perceptions of University of Nebraska-Lincoln TAs. The results reinforced the idea that content, pedagogy, and technology are central aspects for teaching an introductory…

This study examined students' development of reasoning about quantitative bivariate data during a one-semester university-level introductory statistics course. There were three research questions of interest: (1) What is the nature, or pattern of change in students' development in reasoning throughout the course?; (2) Is the sequencing of…

This study considers the evolving influence of variation and expectation on the development of school students' appreciation of distribution as displayed in their construction of graphical representations of data sets. Three interview protocols are employed, presenting different contexts within which 109 students, ranging in age from 6 to 15…

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…