PROCEEDINGS OF THE 16TH ANNUAL CONFERENCE ON RESEARCH IN UNDERGRADUATE MATHEMATICS EDUCATION (Vol 2)
2013
Denver, Colorado
Transfer of Critical Thinking Disposition From Mathematics to Statistics
Page: 2-145
In this study we draw on the constructs of eagerness, flexibility and willingness to characterize the necessary disposition for critical thinking required in learning statistics in addition to specific content knowledge (Ennis, 1989). We investigated the challenges that students who are highly successful in mathematics might have in doing statistics and found that while a student might have an inquisitive disposition and good proficiency with the foundational mathematical concepts such as functions and function transformations, that same student might struggle in statistics. Even concepts that are seemingly related to their mathematical counterparts, such as what is a variable when considering population and sample, may cause problems as the statistical sense is distinct enough from the mathematical sense. We suggest that such students may experience greater than usual affective problems in a statistics class and may, therefore, give up easier and earlier than students who have been less successful mathematically.