Collette LEMIEUX, and Olive CHAPMAN
Mount Royal University
Canada
University of Calgary
Canada
Published in The Mathematician Educator, 2020, Vol 1, No. 1, pp 43-57.
Abstract
Studies in statistics education tend to highlight students’ misconceptions and difficulties in learning statistics. But, from a constructivist perspective of learning, it is important to attend to what students know or can do. In this paper, we attend to this student-oriented perspective of learning through a study that investigated postsecondary students’ learning of statistics. The focus is on the types of understandings demonstrated by postsecondary business students in a first year statistics course with a pedagogical approach based on inquiry-oriented, story-based tasks. Data sources consisted of students written responses to the story-based tasks and followup tasks during the course. The findings indicate six ways of representing the students’ understandings of specific statistics concepts in terms of what they knew and offer a way of extending the types of understanding used to make sense of students’ learning of mathematics and statistics.