Connecting Experimental and Theoretical Perspectives

Abstract

This paper presents a case study of a group of pre-service teachers (age 21-52) as they work in a domain of stochastic abstraction to reason about "experimental" and "theoretical" perspectives. I am particularly interested in investigating whether preservice teachers could construct a bidirectional link between the data-centric and modelling perspectives on distribution, similar to the tentative model I introduced elsewhere for coordinating the two perspectives on distribution. In this study, we have seen echoes of these ideas in relation to experimental and theoretical probabilities. The results show students' movement between probabilities at the micro level and the shape of histograms at the macro level.