Navigation: CAUSEweb -> Research -> Working Groups & Projects

An Investigation of Secondary Students' and Teachers Conceptions of Variability

Funding: National Science Foundation (REC - 0207842)

PI: Mike Shaughnessy, Portland State University

Email: mikesh@pdx.edu

Goals

The primary goal of this project is to develop research-based learning tools and pedagogical approaches and materials to investigate students' understanding of variation in several statistical environments in natural classroom settings. These environments involving variation will include sampling tasks, measurement data, and large multivariate data sets found in the media and on the web. A secondary goal is to engage teachers as research partners to enhance their pedagogical content knowledge of the role and importance of variability. Action research projects by teachers will focus on teaching statistical concepts to develop students' understanding of variability. The project will investigate the development of students' knowledge of the concept of variation in statistical thinking over a period of three years.

Work Plan

Students' thinking in the research classes will be surveyed at various times throughout the project on statistical tasks and data sets. The surveys will be given prior to and after three designed classroom teaching-episodes. Clinical interviews with four randomly selected students in each of the six research classrooms will be conducted prior to, and after, each of the classroom teaching episodes. The statistical tasks used in both the surveys and in the individual interviews will be very similar. In this way details of a selected sample of students' thinking can be gathered in interviews, to help strengthen our analysis of the written surveys. The individual interviews, and the classroom teaching episodes, will all be videotaped.

Progress (11/2004 update)

At the present time, three rounds of individual student interviews over a two year period have been completed. The interviews, 72 of them, 3 each with 24 students, have been edited and stored on CD's for analysis, and for future research and teaching in statistics, We are about 2/3 of the way through the analysis phase of these interviews. The classroom teaching episodes, and their videotapes, were completed in May of 2004, and we continued to select and edit segments of the classroom teaching episodes for research analysis and teaching practice. All student surveys have been completed, the analysis of the first round of surveys is complete, the second round of surveys are currently being analyzed by our research team of grad students and the principal investigator. The main in-school research activity in this remaining year of the project our six teacher-researcher participants as they conduct their own action research projects with their own students in their own classrooms. The funding for this grant has been continued throughout 2005.