PROCEEDINGS OF THE 23RD ANNUAL CONFERENCE ON RESEARCH IN UNDERGRADUATE MATHEMATICS EDUCATION
2020
Boston, Massachusetts
Assessing the disciplinary perspectives of introductory statistics students
Page: 1099
One purpose of introductory statistics courses is to acquaint students with important disciplinary themes, including the nature of a statistical investigation and the types of activities that data analysts engage in. In this paper, we discuss the development of a survey instrument intended to assess the disciplinary perspectives of introductory students. Building from disciplinary profiles proposed in our previous work with social science students taking statistics, combined with current discussions in the literature, we have constructed a four-dimension framework to represent various perspectives we believe students may hold. Through a series of think-aloud interviews with eight, first-semester college freshmen, we focused on establishing the construct validity for items designed to assess students’ views about statistics. This paper documents our methods, highlights our interview findings, and outlines our next steps for validation.