Students' Misconceptions in Interpreting Center and Variability of Data Represented via Histograms and Stem-and-Leaf Plots

By Linda L. Cooper, Felice S. Shore. 2008

71 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper identifies and discusses misconceptions that students have in making judgments of center and variability when data are presented graphically. An assessment addressing interpreting center and variability in histograms and stem-and-leaf plots was administered to, and follow-up interviews were conducted with, undergraduates enrolled in introductory statistics courses. Assessment items focused upon comparing the variability of two data sets of common range represented by bell-shaped histograms on a common scale, computing measures of center from data extracted from graphs, and in comparing the relative location of the mean and median on a histogram from skewed data. Students' misconceptions often stemmed from their difficulty in maintaining understanding of the data that are being represented graphically.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Software, Statistics and Probability

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d73d5ab797796d4ed7108256dff6f6c882d79a6b

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In Statistics and Probability

1. Zaleha Binti Ismail
2. Shiau Wei Chan
3. B. Sumintono

Citations in the corpus

• A Rasch Model Analysis on Secondary Students' Statistical Reasoning Ability in Descriptive Statistics (2014, background): “, 2011), representations of data (Lee and Meletiou-Mavrothesis, 2003; Sharma, 2005; Cooper and Shore, 2008), variability (delMas and Liu, 2005; Matthew and Clark,”