Increasing Statistical Literacy by Exploiting Lexical Ambiguity of Technical Terms

Abstract

Instructional inattention to language poses a barrier for students in entry-level science courses, in part because students may perceive a subject as difficult solely based on the lack of understanding of the vocabulary. In addition, the technical use of terms that have different everyday meanings may cause students to misinterpret statements made by instructors, leading to an incomplete or incorrect understanding of the domain. Terms that have different technical and everyday meanings are said to have lexical ambiguity and statistics, as a discipline, has many lexically ambiguous terms. This paper presents a cyclic process for designing activities to address lexical ambiguity in statistics. In addition, it describes three short activities aimed to have high impact on student learning associated with two different lexically ambiguous words or word pairs in statistics. Preliminary student-level data are used to assess the efficacy of the activities, and future directions for development of activities and research about lexical ambiguity in statistics in particular and STEM in general are discussed.

Facilitating Language-Focused Cooperative Learning in Introductory Statistics Classrooms: A Case Study

“…Students being introduced to unfamiliar academic disciplines undergo a process of concept construction through exposure to, and acquisition of, the language of that discipline. In learning the language of a new discipline, a certain amount of ambiguity in discipline language is experienced, and statistics is an example of this Kaplan & Rogness, 2018;Richardson, Dunn, & Hutchins, 2013;. For this reason, teaching statistical concepts and language is incredibly challenging (Garfield & Ben-Zvi, 2007MacGillivray, 2009) and requires specialised skills to teach statistical concepts through the language used in the discipline Richardson et al, 2016).…”

Statistics students’ identification of inferential model elements within contexts of their own invention

“…They argued that the latter three words might be easier to address through instruction than the former two words (Kaplan et al 2009(Kaplan et al , 2010. Kaplan and Rogness (2018) specifically explored lexical ambiguity related to the word pair 'parameter' and 'statistic.' They found that 'parameter' was often interpreted to mean a "rule or guideline to be followed" (p. 8) and reported that 60% of students interpreted 'statistic' to be a calculated value or variable that was not clearly linked to the sample or population.…”

Simple interventions to assist students to engage with the language of data science and statistics

“…Both studies [5,8] concluded that many students struggled to use lexically ambiguous terms even after a semester of instruction. Another [9] raises awareness of the use of lexically ambiguous terms in class and of interventions to assist students to learn how to use them. They use the example of the word random, which has several non‐statistical meanings.…”

“…The interventions are a crossword, a cloze activity (also called a gap‐fill or sentence frame activity [10]) and a sorting activity. Different types of interventions have been explored, for example, physical objects to represent lexically ambiguous terms [9] and language‐teaching techniques to help students learn statistical language [11].…”