The measurement of school students' understanding of statistical variation

By Jane Watson, Ben Kelly, Rosemary Callingham, Michael F. Shaughnessy. 2003

131 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The paper presents a questionnaire devised to assess school students' understanding of statistical variation. The questionnaire is based on earlier research into students' understanding of the chance and data curriculum and recent work, more specifically related to variation. It was devised, piloted, revised, and administered to 746 students in grades 3, 5, 7, and 9 in ten Tasmanian schools. The analysis of outcomes was carried out in three stages: a hierarchical coding scheme was developed based on a structural model of cognitive development; a Rasch analysis was carried out to produce a variable map of student performance and item difficulty on a single scale; and a holistic model of development was suggested for the questionnaire. Outcomes for individual items are presented to illustrate the range of student responses, and possible rubrics for use by teachers. For some items, comparisons are made with results of other researchers.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Education, Statistics and Probability

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a05753db72ad8ffc430fd9bcff6767dbd6b8f5b3

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Artificial Intelligence

1. Rosemary Callingham
2. Jane Watson
3. J. Reid
4. C. Reading

In Education

1. Rosemary Callingham
2. Jane Watson
3. J. Reid
4. C. Reading

In Statistics and Probability

1. Rosemary Callingham
2. Jane Watson
3. J. Reid
4. C. Reading

Citations in the corpus

• Students' Misconceptions in Interpreting Center and Variability of Data Represented via Histograms and Stem-and-Leaf Plots (2008, background): “Watson and Moritz (2000) looked at how elementary through high school students’ understanding of average changes over time.”
• STATISTICAL LITERACY: A COMPLEX HIERARCHICAL CONSTRUCT (2003, methodology): “Previous studies (e.g., Watson et al., 2003; Watson & Moritz, 1998, 1999a, 2000b) suggested that the expectation of a hierarchical ordering of observed responses was reasonable.”
• AN EMERGING HIERARCHY OF REASONING ABOUT DISTRIBUTION: FROM A VARIATION PERSPECTIVE5 (2006, background): “For example, Watson et al. (2003) have four levels of understanding of variation entitled: Prerequisites for Variation, Partial Recognition of Variation, Applications of Variation, and Critical Aspects of Variation.”