| People make use of quantitative information on a daily basis. Professional education organizations for mathematics, science, social studies, and geography recommend that students, as early as middle school, have experience collecting, organizing, representing, and interpreting data. However, research on middle school students' statistical thinking is isolated. A cohesive picture of middle school students' statistical thinking is needed to better inform curriculum developers and classroom instructors. The purpose of this study was to develop and validate a framework for describing middle school students, thinking across four constructs: describing data, organizing and reducing data, representing data, and analyzing and interpreting data. The validation process involved individually interviewing twelve students across grades 6 through 8. Results of the study indicate that students progress through four levels of thinking within each statistical construct. Results also indicate that students use statistical intuition-on informal intuitive reasoning used in applying statistics within various contexts or situations. Three aspects of statistical intuition include a sense of reasonableness, a sense of balance, and a sense of representativeness. |
