REASONING ABOUT SHAPE AS A PATTERN IN
VARIABILITY
ARTHUR BAKKER
Freudenthal Institute
Utrecht University
The Netherlands
a.bakker@ioe.ac.uk
SUMMARY
This
paper examines ways in which coherent reasoning about key concepts such as
variability, sampling, data, and distribution can be developed as part of
statistics education. Instructional activities that could support such
reasoning were developed through design research conducted with students in
grades 7 and 8. Results are reported from a teaching experiment with grade 8
students that employed two instructional activities in order to learn more
about their conceptual development. A “growing a sample” activity had students
think about what happens to the graph when bigger samples are taken, followed
by an activity requiring reasoning about shape of data. The results suggest
that the instructional activities enable conceptual growth. Last, implications
for teaching, assessment and research are discussed.
Keywords: Design
research; Distribution; Instructional activities; Middle school level; Sampling
__________________________
Statistics Education Research Journal,
3(2), 64-83, http://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/serj
Ó International Association for Statistical Education (IASE/ISI), November, 2004
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ARTHUR BAKKER
Since
September 1, 2004:
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