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…

Evaluating the statistical process is considered a higher order skill and has received little emphasis in instruction. This study analyses thirty 15-year-old students' responses to two statistics assessment tasks, which required evaluation of a statistical investigation. The SOLO taxonomy is used as a framework to develop a hierarchy of responses.…

The study describes the nature of pre-service teachers' idiosyncratic metaphors for the concept of statistical sample. These metaphors were investigated because of their potential to provide insight about individuals' content knowledge and how that content knowledge is enacted during teaching. Personal metaphors were elicited from 54 pre-service…

A postal survey was conducted regarding statistical techniques, research methods and software used in the workplace by 913 graduates with PhD and Masters degrees in the biological sciences, psychology, business, economics, and statistics. The study identified gaps between topics and techniques learned at university and those used in the workplace,…

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…

In this paper we explore issues surrounding university students' experiences of statistics drawing on data related to learning statistics as a compulsory component of psychology. Over 250 students completed a written survey which included questions on their attitudes to learning statistics and their conceptions of statistics. Results indicated…

The status of Statistics teaching has not been sufficiently explored in Agricultural Colleges in Argentina. Although Statistics is considered as an important subject in different academic institutions, there is very little information about the way that it is taught in different university curricula. The aims of this study were to (a) gather…

Little is known about the provision of statistics teaching for PhD students in UK medical schools. A recent survey found that statistics courses were available to PhD students in 13 of 21 schools responding. The provision across these 13 schools was variable in terms of contact hours and content. At a meeting of 27 medical statistics teachers,…

Although variability is of fundamental concern and interest to statisticians, often this does not get communicated to students who are taught instead to view variability as a nuisance parameter. A brief survey of a few case studies, as well as a recounting of some history, shows that variability is worthy of study in its own right, and examination…

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,…

Variability stands in the heart of statistics theory and practice. Concepts and judgments involved in comparing groups have been found to be a productive vehicle for motivating learners to reason statistically and are critical for building the intuitive foundation for inferential reasoning. The focus in this paper is on the emergence of beginners'…

This paper examines ways in which coherent reasoning about key concepts such as variability, sampling, data, and distribution can be developed as part of statistics education. Instructional activities that could support such reasoning were developed through design research conducted with students in grades 7 and 8. Results are reported from a…

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…