RUME 27
2025
Alexandria, Virginia
Student Conceptualizations of Confidence Interval Attributes
Page: 1198
Interval estimation has become one of the preferred means for communicating the statistical findings of a study. Students, and even experienced professionals, often misinterpret frequentist confidence intervals. As part of the broader study in which this work is situated, we developed an instrument to assess undergraduate students’ statistical literacy surrounding confidence intervals. We conducted think-aloud interviews with six students who had recently completed an introductory statistics course. In this work, we qualitatively capture the meanings that students construct about attributes of confidence intervals to inform the results from the instrument. We use grounded theory to model how students conceptualize attributes of confidence intervals and propose evidence of interactions between interrelated ways of thinking. For this paper, we focus on one student’s conceptualizations about the confidence level and error attributes of confidence intervals to illustrate our modeling process in detail.