Critiquing Statistics in Student and Professional Worlds

ABSTRACT

This article compares students' critiques within a class discussion about an invented statistic to STEM professionals' critiques from interviews to better understand how the situated meanings of a statistic are similar and different across student and professional worlds. We discuss similarities and differences in how participants constructed meaning for the statistic, and argue that disciplinary practices in schooling will always have an approximate, and somewhat indeterminate, relation to the figured worlds of professional practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Disciplinary practices
• instructional design
• mathematics education

Funding

The research reported here was supported by the Institute of Education Sciences, US Department of Education, through Grant R305K060091 to Vanderbilt University. The opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not represent views of the Institute or the US Department of Education.

Notes

1 Capitalizing on the student's understanding of repeated measure data, we used the term precision to introduce the concept of variability by asking, “Which of these two groups measured more precisely?”