Learning to Reason About Distribution

Abstract

The purpose of this chapter is to explore how informal reasoning about distribution can be developed in a technological learning environment. The development of reasoning about distribution in seventh-grade classes is described in three stages as students reason about different representations. It is shown how specially designed software tools, students’ created graphs, and prediction tasks supported the learning of different aspects of distribution. In this process, several students came to reason about the shape of a distribution using the term bump along with statistical notions such as outliers and sample size