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Students’ emergent articulations of uncertainty while making informal statistical inferences

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Abstract

Research on informal statistical inference has so far paid little attention to the development of students’ expressions of uncertainty in reasoning from samples. This paper studies students’ articulations of uncertainty when engaged in informal inferential reasoning. Using data from a design experiment in Israeli Grade 5 (aged 10–11) inquiry-based classrooms, we focus on two groups of students working with TinkerPlots on investigations with growing sample size. From our analysis, it appears that this design, especially prediction tasks, helped in promoting the students’ probabilistic language. Initially, the students oscillated between certainty-only (deterministic) and uncertainty-only (relativistic) statements. As they engaged further in their inquiries, they came to talk in more sophisticated ways with increasing awareness of what is at stake, using what can be seen as buds of probabilistic language. Attending to students’ emerging articulations of uncertainty in making judgments about patterns and trends in data may provide an opportunity to develop more sophisticated understandings of statistical inference.

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Notes

  1. These insertions in square brackets are our best guesses of what students mean given the context.

  2. The Hebrew words for conclusion and inference are synonyms. While conclusion is well known to these students, the Hebrew word for statistical inference is unknown to them.

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Acknowledgments

The writing of this paper was funded by the University of Haifa, Utrecht University, and the Australian Research Council.

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Correspondence to Dani Ben-Zvi.

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Ben-Zvi, D., Aridor, K., Makar, K. et al. Students’ emergent articulations of uncertainty while making informal statistical inferences. ZDM Mathematics Education 44, 913–925 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11858-012-0420-3

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