Structuring everyday contexts for statistical treatment: The struggle for shared focus

Abstract

Meaning in statistics is fundamentally related to contexts, which poses the challenge to teach statistics in contexts, taking everyday reasoning as the basis from which to develop statistical reasoning. I investigate how 13 teachers-as-learners in an introductory statistics course co-structure their situation models toward a shared real model that can be treated statistically. I use focal analysis and the constructs of situation models and real models to analyse video data of education students' everyday reasoning about the question “What is a reasonable price for a used car?” As they struggled to structure the context into important variables and relationships between variables, their focus turned from personal decision making to properties of the aggregate of used cars when they were confronted with the emerging complexity of the context. The results show that their everyday reasoning has useful seeds of statistical reasoning which can be re-marked on and developed by the lecturer during the rest of the course.

Keywords:

• statistical reasoning
• modeling
• situation model
• real model