RUME 28
2026
Alexandria, Virginia
Investigating Students’ Ways of Reasoning When Estimating an Unknown Population Parameter
Page: 323
To examine the forms of reasoning novice statistics students employed when reasoning about sampling distributions, I used Charles S. Peirce’s three classic forms of inferential reasoning— deduction, induction, and abduction—defined by case, rule, and result. In this paper, I report on a subset of these findings by describing and comparing the reasoning of seven undergraduate students. I engaged each student in a statistical task that I designed to investigate their reasoning in a repeated sampling environment when given a population with an unknown parameter. Findings indicate that abductive reasoning was powerful in making inferences from sample data to the unknown population.