ELASTIC: An Environment for Learning Abstract Statistical Thinking

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Recent technological advances and a growing awareness of the importance of teaching statistical reasoning provide us an opportunity to simultaneously advance the state of educational technology and the high school mathematics curriculum. Our past two years' of research on the role of technology in the teaching of statistical reasoning have led us to focus on methods for making inherently abstract statistical concepts more concrete and therefore more accessible and comprehensible. To implement and test these ideas, system called ELASTIC: An Environment for Learning Abstract Statistical Thinking, will be developed. The system's pedagogical power will derive from new techniques for visualizing and manipulating abstract statistical entities. Students will be able to interact with concrete representations of statistical objects such as distributions and statistical processes such as sampling. They will perform experiments in video-and computer-based statistical microworlds. Their analysis process will be guided by a planning environment that will include concrete representations of statistical plans. The system will be tested in the context of a semester-long high school course on Reasoning Under Uncertainty. In parallel, the system will also be used in more controlled settings as a tool for understanding the misconceptions students retain about statistical thinking.