Abstract
Six 7th-grade students engaged with an instructional sequence involving the use of the TinkerPlots software to organize data sets in ways intended to help them construe two attributes: the location of quarters of the data within a sub-range of the entire set, and the spread of those portions. We present evidence of students’ thinking about these attributes drawn from their responses to questions posed in the instructional sequence. Comparison of findings from a pre-test and a culminating task suggest that the students enriched their ability to imagine and create hypothetical data from a given representative box plot, and that they became oriented to the spread of portions of a data set as indicated by the length of its quarters.
Résumé
Six élèves de 7e année ont participé à une séquence pédagogique impliquant l’utilisation du logiciel TinkerPlotsMC dans le but d’organiser des ensembles de données de façon à ce que cela les aide à interpréter deux attributs: l’emplacement des données organisées en quartiles à l’intérieur d’un sous-intervalle de variation et la répartition de ces portions. À partir des réponses données aux questions posées dans la séquence pédagogique, nous montrons comment les élèves conçoivent ces attributs. Quand on compare les conclusions tirées d’un prétest avec celles d’une tâche intégratrice, on constate que les élèves ont amélioré leur aptitude pour imaginer et concevoir des données hypothétiques résultant d’un diagramme de quartiles représentatif donné; et qu’ils se sont orientés vers la répartition des portions d’ensembles de données en fonction de l’étendue des quartiles.
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This report is based on work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0953987.
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Saldanha, L., Hatfield, N. Students Conceptualizing the Box Plot as a Tool for Structuring Quantitative Data: a Design Experiment Using TinkerPlots. Can. J. Sci. Math. Techn. Educ. 21, 758–782 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42330-021-00184-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s42330-021-00184-0