A Critical Step in Students' Reasoning about Distribution: Moving from Understanding to Using for Inference

Abstract

Recently researchers in statistics education have been focusing on how students reason about various statistical concepts, in particular distribution. The 'Fifth International Research Forum on Statistical Reasoning, Thinking and Literacy' (SRTL5) focused on reasoning about distribution and the proceedings (Makar, 2005), as well as a special issue (volume 5 number 2) of the 'Statistics Education Research Journal' (SERJ) in November 2006, reported the nature of this reasoning and how it might be supported. Included in the reported research was a hierarchy developed from student responses and proposed as a framework for assessing the cognitive development of students' reasoning about distribution (Reading & Reid, 2006). This paper revisits that hierarchy and presents research that aimed to provide information to assist educators to recognise how students progress through the hierarchy.