Towards an Understanding of Statistical Thinking

Improving statistical skills through students’ participation in the development of resources

“…The interviews and questionnaires show evidence of various modes of thought relevant to statistical thinking [12]. Furthermore, our analysis revealed a sixth mode of thought, which we call awareness of multiple approaches, which we also discuss.…”

“…For statistical thinking we looked for evidences regarding the five modes of statistical thinking proposed by Pfannkuch and Wild in [12]; for statistical reasoning we looked for evidence of relating underlying theory to practice, following the distinction made by delMas [13]; for transferrable skills we looked for evidences of any of the skills considered by Belli [15] required for statistical consulting. The third research question: "How and to what extent did students participate in a resource development practice during the project and how did this participation contribute to their learning?"…”

“…For this reason, we will focus only on statistical reasoning and statistical thinking in the evaluation of this project. In our analysis, we draw in particular on the work of Pfannkuch and Wild in [12], and their five fundamental modes of statistical thinking: recognition of the need for data, transnumeration, consideration of variation, reasoning with statistical models and integrating the statistical and contextual. Also, we use the work of delMas in [13] to distinguish between statistical thinking and statistical reasoning.…”

“…This investigation revealed that students explicitly linked their participation to the solidification and organisation of their statistical knowledge. This statistical knowledge was evident in the terms of statistical thinking [12] and reasoning [13] as well as consultancy skills [15]. Furthermore, this participation contributed to their learning about how statistics is taught and learnt and, especially for non-mathematics students to their learning of the statistical discourse and its contextual variations.…”

Panorama De La Investigación en Educación Estadística Desde Tesis Doctorales 2000-2014

“…En la gráfica 4 se observa que dicho enfoque es más utilizado en las tesis originadas en de Estados Unidos, resultado que no sorprende dado que esta aproximación fue concebida principalmente por investigadores de ese país y la mayor parte de las tesis de la muestra han sido desarrolladas allí. Se requiere precisar que solo en algunos trabajos doctorales se alude a estos tres constructos cognitivos de manera conjunta, como lo plantean delMas (2002), Gal (2002), Garfield (2002), y Pfannkuch y Wild (2004). No obstante, los trabajos restantes que se han ubicado en este enfoque se refieren por lo menos a uno de los constructos bajo las ideas de tales autores.…”