PROCEEDINGS OF THE 22ND ANNUAL CONFERENCE ON RESEARCH IN UNDERGRADUATE MATHEMATICS EDUCATION
2019
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
Studying the relationship between students’ perception of the mean and their understanding of variance
Page: 1179
This poster explores how Introduction to Statistics students think about and compare the mean and variability of four datasets. They explored the datasets through various representations (e.g., balance beam, leveling off) and ranked them from most to least variance. When exploring the mean, the students found value in both the balance beam and leveling off representation, but preferred the balance beam for reasoning about variability. However, when reasoning about the variance using the balance beam representation, the students focused on the wrong properties and made faulty inferences. When reasoning using the leveling off representation, they focused on the correct properties and made sound inferences about the data.