PROCEEDINGS OF THE 21ST ANNUAL CONFERENCE ON RESEARCH IN UNDERGRADUATE MATHEMATICS EDUCATION
2018
San Diego, California
Cognitive Resources in Student Reasoning about Mean Tendency
Page: 1345
The ability to conceptualize the sample mean as having a distribution is essential to the development of statistical reasoning. Considerable research on student thinking exists on this topic, but this literature largely assumes a misconception model. This study takes a grounded theory approach to investigate the cognitive resources incoming students possess to reason about sampling distributions and mean tendency. This preliminary report includes data from a pilot study with one student enrolled in an introductory statistics course. She completed both a pre- and post-instruction interview that involved prompts about the distribution of the ages of pennies in circulation and related questions about average ages of groups of pennies. We identify several cognitive resources elicited by the pre- and post-interviews, consider the influence of instruction on the activation of these resources, and briefly discuss implications to statistics teaching. Finally, we outline next steps for data collection with 8-10 students.