Over the past fifteen years there has been so much growth in research in Statistics Education throughout both the national and international statistics and mathematics education communities that it has become impossible for anyone to keep up on it all. Yet, that is exactly what I was asked to try to do in a recent review, analysis, and synthesis of research in statistics education, published by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. Most of the research in statistics education has concentrated on students' statistical reasoning and learning, at all levels, elementary through tertiary. Although there has been some research on teachers' knowledge of statistics, and teaching practices in statistics, the bulk of research has concentrated on students' understandings of some big ideas in statistics, such as centers, variation, comparison of data sets, and samples and sampling.

This talk will focus on a few of the themes that have arisen during the past several decades of research on student reasoning in statistics. Often the story that emerges about students' statistical reasoning is encapsulated from responses to what I call "Telling Tasks." These are tasks that are particularly helpful in shedding light on the variety of ways that students can and do reason about big ideas in statistics, such as centers, variation, sampling, and data sets in general. Examples of tasks, as well as student responses to these tasks, will be shared throughout the talk. This research review process also uncovered some possible suggestions for future research, and some implications for the teaching of statistics, which will be included in the discussion.

Mike Shaughnessy is the director of the doctoral program in mathematics education in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Portland State University, and is also currently the director of a four-year NSF ROLE project to investigate middle and secondary students' conceptions of variability and distribution in statistics. He has served as a member of the Board of Directors of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (2001 to 2004), and is beginning the second year of a two-year term on the Board of the Special Interest Group for Research in Mathematics Education (SIG/RME). Throughout his career, Dr. Shaughnessy's principal research interests have been in the teaching and learning of statistics and probability (stochastics), and the teaching and learning of geometry. He has worked in the area of students' understanding of chance and data since his graduate student days, and has attempted to synthesize and build on the contributions of psychologists and math/stat educators alike to our understanding of student learning in stochastics (data and chance), particularly in his 1992 chapter Probability and Statistics: Reflections and Directions which appeared in the first edition of the Handbook of Research on Mathematics Teaching and Learning. His current writing projects include a chapter on research in statistics in the forthcoming second edition of the Handbook of Research in Mathematics Teaching and Learning (Infoage Pubs), as well as a forthcoming chapter on the 2000 and 2003 NAEP results from Grades 4 and 8 in probability and statistics (NCTM). In his work in probability and statistics, Dr. Shaughnessy has collaborated on research projects and papers with Jane Watson, Maxine Pfannkuch, Chris Reading, and James Tarr, among other statistics educators.