PROCEEDINGS OF THE 17TH ANNUAL CONFERENCE ON RESEARCH IN UNDERGRADUATE MATHEMATICS EDUCATION
2014
Denver, Colorado
Exploring Students’ Ways of Thinking About Sampling Distributions
Page: 1151
The concept of a sampling distribution plays a central role in the process of making statistical inferences. However, students typically struggle to understand and reason about sampling distributions. This study seeks to characterize the ways undergraduate students think about sampling distributions in scenarios involving repeated sampling and making statistical inferences. Eight students in an introductory statistics class worked on problems involving sampling distributions during a semi-structured interview. A framework was developed based on their responses to describe the ways they discussed and coordinated various aspects of the population and sampling distributions by focusing on the processes of sampling and repeated sampling; these descriptions suggest that explicitly coordinating particular aspects of these processes may correspond to the robustness of students’ conceptions of sampling distributions.