RUME 28
2026
Alexandria, Virginia
Prospective Teachers' Model-Building of Student Thinking About Sampling Distributions
Page: 1317
Prospective secondary mathematics and statistics teachers (PSTs) should have opportunities to analyze student work and construct “second-order models” of student thinking—that is, PSTs’ conceptions of students’ thinking informed by their observations and knowledge for teaching. We report findings from a qualitative analysis of group discussions in a curriculum course where PSTs constructed second-order models in response to hypothetical students’ statements about sampling distributions. The analysis revealed productive engagement with key statistical ideas and evidence of elaborate forms of second-order model-building while also revealing opportunities to more comprehensively attend to the features of the sampling distribution concept. Additionally, this work contributes to existing literature documenting PSTs' understandings of the sampling distribution concept. More broadly, our work suggests that engaging PSTs in second-order model-building can help teacher educators surface and address underemphasized statistical ideas, supporting deeper content knowledge for teaching.