Joan Garfield

• University of Minnesota

One of the first simulation-based introductory statistics curricula to be developed was the NSF-funded Change Agents for Teaching and Learning STatistics (CATALST) curriculum. True to its name, this curriculum is constantly undergoing change. This paper describes the story of the curriculum as it has evolved at the University of Minnesota and offer...

This file is a complete online version of the book: The Assessment Challenge in Statistics Education (Iddo Gal & Joan Garfield, Eds, 1997). The file contains all 19 chapters and the frontmatter and endmatter from the original 1997 hardcopy book published by IOS Press. The Copyright holder is the International Statistical Institute (C). Permission...

Statistical literacy and statistical reasoning are important learning goals that instructors aim to develop in statistics students. However, there is a lack of clarity regarding the relationship among these learning goals and to what extent they overlap. The REasoning and Literacy Instrument (REALI) was designed to concurrently measure statistical...

This handbook connects the practice of statistics to the teaching and learning of the subject with contributions from experts in several disciplines. Chapters present current challenges and methods of statistics education in the changing world for statistics and mathematics educators. Issues addressed include current and future challenges in profes...

Statistics education is an interdisciplinary field that is focused on the teaching and learning of statistics. This chapter describes how the discipline of statistics education has emerged and evolved from the training of statistics practitioners to the education of students at all levels and from a practice rooted in mathematics and science to a s...

Cognitive transfer is the ability to apply learned skills and knowledge to new applications and contexts. This investigation evaluates cognitive transfer outcomes for a tertiary-level introductory statistics course using the CATALST curriculum, which exclusively used simulation-based methods to develop foundations of statistical inference. A common...

Cognitive transfer is the ability to apply learned skills and knowledge to new applications and contexts. This investigation evaluates cognitive transfer outcomes for a tertiary-level introductory statistics course using the CATALST curriculum, which exclusively used simulation-based methods to develop foundations of statistical inference. A common...

Graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) are responsible for the instruction of many statistics courses offered at the university level, yet little is known about these students' preparation for teaching, their beliefs about how introductory statistics should be taught, or the pedagogical practices of the courses they teach. An online survey to examine...

Research in statistics education and measurement suggest the use of quality instruments with good psychometric characteristics to measure students’ learning outcomes. However, very few quality instruments have been developed, evaluated, and are available to researchers to measure students’ statistical knowledge. This paper reports the development o...

A concise history of the SRTK International research collaboration co-authored by its founders and co-chairs.

This chapter describes the development of students’ thinking as they experienced an innovative introductory statistics curriculum that replaced traditional content and methods with an approach based on simulation and resampling. The methods employed in the curriculum were based on a framework for inference that had students specify a chance model,...

This paper describes the importance of developing students’ reasoning about samples and sampling variability as a foundation for statistical thinking. Research on expert–novice thinking as well as statistical thinking is reviewed and compared. A case is made that statistical thinking is a type of expert thinking, and as such, research comparing nov...

This article presents an activity that engages students in considering characteristics of a random sequence, in this case, a randomly generated playlist of songs using the iPod shuffle feature. Students examine simulated sequences of randomly generated songs from a small music library in order to identify characteristics that are used to develop ru...

While models are an important concept in statistics, few introductory statistics courses at the tertiary level put models at the core of the curriculum. This paper reports on a radically different approach to teaching statistics at the tertiary level, one that uses models and simulation as the organizing theme of the course. The focus on modeling a...

In this paper I summarize my 25 years of research on teaching and learning statistics, as I participated in the emergence of statistics education as a research discipline. This summary and reflection are presented through stories of research projects I have been involved in, all of which involved collaborations with colleagues who have made importa...

This paper describes the development and validation of the Statistical Reasoning Assessment (SRA), an instrument consisting of 20 multiple-choice items involving probability and statistics concepts. Each item offers several choices of responses, both correct and incorrect, which include statements of reasoning explaining the rationale for a particu...

This study examined students' development of reasoning about quantitative bivariate data during a one-semester university-level introductory statistics course. There were three research questions of interest: (1) What is the nature, or pattern of change in students' development in reasoning throughout the course?; (2) Is the sequencing of quantitat...

This paper reports on an instrument designed to assess the practices and beliefs of instructors of introductory statistics courses across the disciplines. Funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation, this project developed, piloted, and gathered validity evidence for the Statistics Teaching Inventory (STI). The instrument consists of...

This paper reports on an instrument designed to assess the practices and beliefs of instructors of introductory statistics courses across the disciplines. Funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation, this project developed, piloted, and gathered validity evidence for the Statistics Teaching Inventory (STI). The instrument consists of...

SERJ has provided a high quality professional publication venue for researchers in statistics education for close to a decade. This paper presents a review of the articles published to explore what they suggest about the field of statistics education, the researchers, the questions addressed, and the growing knowledge base on teaching and learn...

Assessing student learning of statistics poses unique challenges to mathematics teachers at the elementary and secondary level. This chapter describes some guiding principles for developing or selecting assessment items, building on general pillars of good assessment practice as well as important features of the discipline of statistics. The chapte...

The authors present a precursor version of inference and then develop some specific and highly visual methods. These build on novel ways of experiencing sampling variation and are intuitive related to the standard formal methods of making inferences in introductory courses at university. The proposal uses visual comparisons to enable the inferentia...

Although much attention has been paid to issues around student assessment, for most introductory statistics courses few changes have taken place in the ways students are assessed. The assessment literature describes three foundational elements—cognition, observation, and interpretation—that comprise an “assessment triangle” underlying all assessmen...

Translation of the book The challenge of developing statistical literacy, reasoning, and thinking to Korean

This chapter illustrates the method of designing and creating an assessment plan that supports learning and that is aligned with the aforementioned goals laid out by the statistics education community. It provides working definitions of the learning outcomes that appear to be valued by the statistics education community, namely, statistical literac...

The NCTM “Curriculum and Evaluation Standards for School Mathematics” (1989) reflect the current movement to introduce probability and statistics in the precollege curriculum. These standards include topics and principles for instruction in probability and statistics which are included in the Quantitative Literacy Project (QLP) curriculum materials...

Increasing attention has been given over the last decade by the statistics, mathematics and science education communities to the development of statistical literacy and numeracy skills of all citizens and the enhancement of statistics education at all levels. This paper introduces the emerging discipline of statistics education and considers its ro...

The Assessment Resource Tools for Improving Statistical Thinking (ARTIST) Web site was developed to provide high-quality assessment resources for faculty who teach statistics at the tertiary level but resources are also useful to statistics teachers at the secondary level. This article describes some of the numerous ARTIST resources and suggests wa...

The Assessment Resource Tools for Improving Statistical Thinking (ARTIST) Web site was developed to provide high-quality assessment resources for faculty who teach statistics at the tertiary level but resources are also useful to statistics teachers at the secondary level. This article describes some of the numerous ARTIST resources and suggests wa...

This article describes a model for an interactive, introductory secondary- or tertiary-level statistics course that is designed to develop students' statistical reasoning. This model is called a ‘Statistical Reasoning Learning Environment’ and is built on the constructivist theory of learning.

This paper describes a unique graduate-level course that prepares teachers of introductory statistics at the college and high school levels. The course was developed as part of a graduate degree program in statistics education. Although originally taught in a face-to-face setting, the class has been converted to an online course to be accessible to...

In this paper we discuss how two different types of professional development projects for school teachers are based on the same framework and are used to prepare knowledgeable and effective teachers of statistics. The first example involves a graduate course for masters’ students in elementary mathematics education at the University of Haifa, Israe...

Informal inferential reasoning is a relatively recent concept in the research literature. Several research studies have defined this type of cognitive process in slightly different ways. In this paper, a working definition of informal inferential reasoning based on an analysis of the key aspects of statistical inference, and on research from ed...

This article introduces the recently adopted Guidelines for the Assessment and Instruction in Statistics Education (GAISE) and provides two examples of introductory statistics courses that have been redesigned to better align with these guidelines.

all rights reserved. This text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the authors and advance notification of the editor. Abstract Since the first studies on the teaching and learning of statistics appeared in the research literature, the scholarship in this area has...

This paper provides practical examples of how statistics educators may apply a cooperative framework to classroom teaching and teacher collaboration. Building on the premise that statistics instruction ought to resemble statistical practice, an inherently cooperative enterprise, our purpose is to highlight specific ways in which cooperative methods...

Informal inferential reasoning is a relatively recent concept in the research literature. Several research studies have defined this type of cognitive process in slightly different ways. In this paper, a working definition of informal inferential reasoning based on an analysis of the key aspects of statistical inference, and on research from educat...

Increased attention is being paid to the need for statistically educated citizens: statistics is now included in the K-12 mathematics curriculum, increasing numbers of students are taking courses in high school, and introductory statistics courses are required in college. However, increasing the amount of instruction is not sufficient to prepare st...

This paper provides an overview of current research on teaching and learning statistics, summarizing studies that have been conducted by researchers from different disciplines and focused on students at all levels. The review is organized by general research questions addressed, and suggests what can be learned from the results of each of these que...

This paper describes the development of the CAOS test, designed to measure students’ conceptual understanding of important statistical ideas, across three years of revision and testing, content validation, and realiability analysis. Results are reported from a large scale class testing and item responses are compared from pretest to posttest in...

This paper provides a broad overview of the role technological tools can play in helping students understand and reason about important statistical ideas. We summarize recent developments in the use of technology in teaching statistics in light of changes in course content, pedagogical methods, and instructional formats. Issues and practical challe...

The interaction between new curricular goals for students and alternative methods of assessing student learning is described. Suggestions are offered for teachers of statistics who wish to re-examine their classroom assessment practices in light of these changes. Examples are offered of some innovative assessment approaches that have been used in i...

This paper describes the development of the CAOS test, designed to measure students' conceptual understanding of important statistical ideas, across three years of revision and testing, content validation, and realiability analysis. Results are reported from a large scale class testing and item responses are compared from pretest to posttest in ord...

This article is a discussion of and reaction to two collections of papers on research on Reasoning about Variation: Five papers appeared in November 2004 in a Special Issue 3(2) of the Statistics Education Research Journal (by Hammerman and Rubin, Ben-Zvi, Bakker, Reading, and Gould), and three papers appear in a Special Section on the same topic i...

This book focuses on one aspect of the “infancy” of the field of statistics education research, by attempting to grapple with the definitions, distinctions, and development of statistical literacy, reasoning, and thinking. As this field grows, the research studies in this volume should help provide a strong foundation as well as a common research l...

SUMMARY This paper describes the analysis of assessment items used in a large scale class testing of high school and college students to learn how students reason about graphical representations of distribution. We focus on the use of items that reveal some consistent errors and misconceptions students exhibit when presented with graphical represen...

We are very pleased to introduce this special issue of the Statistics Education Research Journal (SERJ), which presents cutting-edge research in an area of increasing importance: Reasoning about variability. The notion of variability and the importance of its role in statistics have been documented by David Moore, the well-known statistician and fo...

This chapter presents a series of research studies focused on the difficulties students experience when learning about sampling distributions. In particular, the chapter traces the seven-year history of an ongoing collaborative research project investigating the impact of students’ interaction with computer software tools to improve their reasoning...

Research in statistics education is an emerging field, with much of the work being published in diverse journals across many disciplines. Locating and synthesizing this research is often a challenging task, as is connecting the research literature to practical issues of teaching and assessing students. This book is unique in that it collects, prese...

SUMMARY Over the last fifteen years there has been a strong emphasis on active learning, use of real data in the classroom, and innovative uses of technology for helping students learn statistics. A recent survey in the United States (Garfield, 2001) documents that many tertiary teachers of statistics courses have made changes toward these recommen...

This paper defines statistical reasoning and reviews research on this topic. Types of correct and incorrect reasoning are summarized, and statistical reasoning about sampling distributions is examined in more detail. A model of statistical reasoning is presented, and suggestions are offered for assessing statistical reasoning. The paper concludes w...

Despite considerable research having been done in the area of sex differences in mathematical ability, statistical ability has rarely been the subject of a major research effort. This study focuses on the question of whether there are sex differences in statistical reasoning for college students. Participants included 245 college students in Taiwan...

Over the past twenty years much has been written about the introductory or service course in statistics. Historically, this course has been viewed as difficult and unpleasant by many students and frustrating and unrewarding to teach by many instructors. Dissatisfactions with the introductory course have led people to suggest new models for the cour...