Students' errors and difficulties for solving problems of sampling distributions by means of computer simulation.

This paper reports results the main errors and difficulties experienced by a group of eleven university students when solving problems of sampling distributions by means of computer simulation using Fathom software (Finzer et. al, 2002). The main difficulties were the formulation of the population model, the definition of the statistics to be calculated in each sample and the definition of the intervals to calculate the probabilities. It was not necessary to carry out some of the long processes of the pencil and paper environment which are the source of several mistakes and difficulties. It was also possible to facilitate the interpretation of some results such as the proportions of cases of interest out of the total of possible cases.