USING DATA COMPARISON TO SUPPORT A FOCUS ON DISTRIBUTION: EXAMINING PRESERVICE TEACHERS’ UNDERSTANDINGS OF DISTRIBUTION WHEN ENGAGED IN STATISTICAL INQUIRY

By A. Leavy. Statistics Education Research Journal, 2006

51 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This exploratory study, a one group pretest-posttest design, investigated the development of elementary preservice teachers’ understandings of distribution as expressed in the measures and representations used to compare data distributions. During a semester-long mathematics methods course, participants worked in small groups on two statistical inquiry projects requiring the collection, representation, analysis and reporting of data with the ultimate goal of comparing distributions of data. Many participants shifted from reporting descriptive exclusively to the combined use of graphical representations and descriptive statistics which supported a focus on distributional shape and coordinated variability and center. Others gained skills and understandings related to statistical measures and representations yet failed to utilize these when comparing distributions. Gaps and misconceptions in statistical understanding are discussed. Recommendations for supporting the development of conceptual understanding relating to distribution are outlined. First published November 2006 at Statistics Education Research Journal Archives

Subfields: Statistics and Probability

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e4349c0608c9ce78cd35b89dbc2996cf7354dc6d

How researchers see this paper

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

In Statistics and Probability

1. Dani Ben-Zvi
2. Joan Garfield
3. Jere Confrey
4. R. Hassad
5. Sibel Kazak
6. Arthur Bakker
7. K. Makar
8. Esma Emmioglu

Citations in the corpus

• How Students Learn Statistics Revisited: A Current Review of Research on Teaching and Learning Statistics (2007, background): “A newer line of research that has also been the focus of studies by mathematics educators is the study of pre-service or practicing teachers’ knowledge of statistics and probability, and how that understanding develops in different contexts (e.g. Makar & Confrey, 2005; Leavy, 2006; Pfannkuch, 2006).”
• THE CHALLENGE OF PREPARING PRESERVICE TEACHERS TO TEACH INFORMAL INFERENTIAL REASONING (2010, unknown): “…reasoning: the mean (Gfeller, Niess, & Lederman, 1999; Leavy & O’Loughlin, 2006; Mevarech, 1983; Pollatsek, Lima, & Well, 1981), median (Friel & Bright, 1998; Groth & Bergner, 2006), variability (Canada, 2004), and reasoning about distributions (Leavy, 2004, 2006; Makar & Confrey, 2002).”