Learning to reason about sample and sampling in the context of developing informal inferential reasoning: a longitudinal perspective

This longitudinal study follows the development of students’ reasoning about sample and sampling from 6th to 9th grade (age 12 to 15). The students took part in the Connections project (Ben-Zvi, Gil & Apel, 2007), an inquiry-based learning environment using TinkerPlots (Konold & Miller, 2005) in grades 4–6. One of the main goals was to develop their reasoning about sample and sampling in the context of making informal statistical inferences. After three years in which these students hardly had any formal statistics teaching at all, a series of inquiry-based activities were designed and administered in the 9th grade to evaluate aspects of continuity and change in their reasoning about sample and sampling. The SRTL-7 paper will present preliminary results which are part of the first author's Ph.D. study.