PROCEEDINGS OF THE 17TH ANNUAL CONFERENCE ON RESEARCH IN UNDERGRADUATE MATHEMATICS EDUCATION
2014
Denver, Colorado
Student Understanding Of Mean, Distribution And Standard Deviation
Page: 524
This study investigates the understandings of mean, median, distribution and standard deviation that undergraduate students have at the end of an introductory statistics course. The goal was to explore their understandings as a follow-up to previous studies documenting incoming student difficulties with the concepts and determine whether a course would help them achieve a more statistically appropriate understanding. They overwhelmingly think about the mean as the “average” and via the calculating formula, meaning they understand it as a process. Similarly, they understand the median in terms of the process for determining it, or via the location-based term, “middle.” As a result, students do not generally understand the two measures to be describing a similar concept. Students do, reliably connect the shape of a distribution to standard deviation, but that connection varies by type of display and is not based on a reliable rule.