Coordinating student learning and teacher activity – The case of Savannah: Motivating an understanding of representativeness through examination of distributions of data

Abstract

This research study investigated the measures chosen by five 4th to 8th grade students when selecting statistical measures to describe distributions of data. Over the course of eight weeks of instruction, individual teaching experiments were conducted to investigate the development of understanding of distribution. The results indicate that consideration of representativeness was a major factor that motivated modification of approaches to constructing indices of distributions. This paper outlines the case of a 4th grade student who participated in the study and narrates her journey as she grappled with increasingly complex statistical ideas relating to representativeness.