Students' Attention to Variability when Comparing Distributions


Book: 
Paper Presented at the Research Presession of the 82nd Annual Meeting of the<br>National Council of Teachers of Mathematics
Authors: 
Shaughnessy, J. M., Ciancetta, M., Best, K. &amp; Canada, D.
Editors: 
Starkings, S.
Category: 
Year: 
2004
Publisher: 
National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, Philadelphia, PA
URL: 
RISE
Abstract: 

In the past, K-12 mathematics students' exposure to statistical concepts has been rather impoverished, consisting primarily of measures of center-mean, median, mode-and perhaps some graphical representations of data. Both the Curriculum and Evaluation Standards (NCTM, 1989) and the Principles and Standards for School Mathematics (NCTM, 2000) advocate for a much wider and deeper role for statistics in school mathematics, including reasoning about data in context and making data-based decisions. An understanding of the role of variability in various contexts-e.g., in sampling, in data sets, and in probability experiments-is one of the critical components students need for statistical reasoning. The research reported here on students' conceptions of variability is part of a three-year NSF grant The Development of Secondary Students' Conceptions of Variability (Shaughnessy, 2003).

The CAUSE Research Group is supported in part by a member initiative grant from the American Statistical Association’s Section on Statistics and Data Science Education

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