PROCEEDINGS OF THE 15TH ANNUAL CONFERENCE ON RESEARCH IN UNDERGRADUATE MATHEMATICS EDUCATION (Vol 1)
2012
Portland, Oregon
Towards a description of symbol sense for statistics
Page: 1-134
This is a first attempt to describe how students might develop a statistical symbol sense and what such a symbol sense entails. The paper first presents a genetic decomposition for a symbolic understanding of the arithmetic mean, the standard deviation and the standard error of the sample means of a sampling distribution by drawing on Sfard’s (1991) process-object duality. There is currently little research in which to ground a genetic decomposition and, as a result, the one presented here draws primarily upon the authors’ experience teaching statistics. It needs extensive testing and revision, but it is meant to serve as a starting point for future investigations into students’ development of understanding of statistical symbols. The paper ends by describing some important attributes of a symbol sense in statistics based upon Sfard’s (1991) framework and Arcavi’s (1994) description of a symbol sense in mathematics.