Thinking Tools and Variation
Maxine Pfannkuch
The University of Auckland, New Zealand
m.pfannkuch@auckland.ac.nz
Editor’s note: This article is a discussion of and reaction to five papers which appeared in the SERJ special issue 3(2) published in November 2004, on Research on Reasoning about Variation and Variability. These include four refereed papers reporting original research, by Hammerman and Rubin, Ben-Zvi, Bakker, and Reading, and Gould’s invited paper providing a statistician’s view of variation and its analysis. For brevity, these papers will be referenced here only by author names, without the year of publication.
Summary
This article discusses five papers focused on “Research on Reasoning about Variation and Variability”, by Hammerman and Rubin, Ben-Zvi, Bakker, Reading, and Gould, which appeared in a special issue of the Statistics Education Research Journal (No. 3(2) November 2004). Three issues emerged from these papers. First, there is a link between the types of tools that students use and the type of reasoning about variation that is observed. Second, students’ reasoning about variation is interconnected to all parts of the statistical investigation cycle. Third, learning to reason about variation with tools and to understand phenomena are two elements that should be reflected in teaching. The discussion points to the need to expand instruction to include both exploratory data analysis and classical inference approaches and points to directions for future research.
Keywords:
Statistics education;
Variation; Reasoning; Thinking tools; Statistical investigation; Exploratory
data analysis
__________________________
Statistics Education Research
Journal, 4(1), 83-91, http://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/serj
Ó International Association for Statistical Education (IASE/ISI), May, 2005
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maxine pfannkuch
Department of Statistics
The University of Auckland
Private Bag 92019
Auckland
New Zealand