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 subsets of data values within a subrange of the entire set and the length of the intervals comprised by those subsets. Findings from a pretest and a culminating task suggest that the students enriched their ability to imagine and create a hypothetical data distribution 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 quartiles.
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Notes
- 1.
Scenario and box plots were retrieved from http://onlinestatbook.com/chapter2/Box plots.html on April 28, 2011.
- 2.
The results for Question (ii) were nearly identical to those for Question (i) and are therefore not displayed here.
- 3.
We follow Tukey’s (1977) usage and refer to “hinges” as the numerical values that delineate the boundaries of the boxes and whiskers, and to “quartiles” as the intervals constituted by those boxes and whiskers.
- 4.
The task was designed to mimic Question (v) of the pretest, so that we might assess students’ thinking at post-experiment.
- 5.
These students were not studying statistics in their regular class during the semester in which they participated in the teaching experiment. It is therefore implausible that this enrichment was due to their regular school instruction.
- 6.
This information is not indicated in the table.
References
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Acknowledgment
This report is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0953987. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this report are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
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Saldanha, L., McAllister, M. (2016). Building Up the Box Plot as a Tool for Representing and Structuring Data Distributions: An Instructional Effort Using Tinkerplots and Evidence of Students’ Reasoning. In: Ben-Zvi, D., Makar, K. (eds) The Teaching and Learning of Statistics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-23470-0_29
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-23470-0_29
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