Diagnosis of the reading and interpretation of statistical graphs by undergraduate students from economic-administrative sciences programs at the University of Guadalajara

Abstract

Recently, statistical reasoning has been of vital importance not only in quantitative analysis but also in the interpretation of graphs at all educational levels. There are students that can make calculations almost immediately but are not able to interpret or present their ideas graphically. In this way, the present study seeks to conduct a diagnostic of the problems that economic-administrative students have when reading and interpreting graphs in their statistics courses. For this, a Spanish version of the test Comprehensive Assessment of Outcomes in Statistics (CAOS) was administered. This instrument allows for the determination of reasoning applied to different types of statistical graphs and in some cases to determine what type of calculation is required to do it. The instrument was applied to 138 undergraduate students from the economic-administrative area of the University of Guadalajara during January-June 2018. The results show that a large percentage of students confuse a normal distribution with a uniform one and that they are unable to distinguish that a bias can be determined from the measures of central tendency and dispersion, as well as other statistical reasoning difficulties. This may be as a result of a deficiency that exists in statistical teaching, an insufficient mathematical preparation on the part of the students, among other factors.