ELASTIC: An Environment for Learning Abstract Statistical Thinking

最近的技术进步和对统计推理教学重要性的日益认识为我们提供了一个机会，使我们能够同时推进教育技术和高中数学课程的发展。我们过去两年对技术在统计推理教学中的作用的研究使我们把重点放在如何使本质上抽象的统计概念更具体，从而更容易获得和理解的方法。为了实施和测试这些想法，将开发一个名为弹性：学习抽象统计思维的环境的系统。该系统的教学力量将来自可视化和操纵抽象统计实体的新技术。学生将能够与统计对象(如分布)和统计过程(如抽样)的具体表示进行交互。他们将在基于视频和计算机的统计微观世界中进行实验。他们的分析过程将在规划环境的指导下进行，其中将包括统计计划的具体表述。该系统将在为期一学期的高中不确定性推理课程的背景下进行测试。同时，该系统还将在更受控制的环境中使用，作为一种工具，用于理解学生对统计思维的误解。

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.