Reasoning About Distribution

What does distribution mean to students? What are the simplest forms and representations of distributions that children can understand? When and how do children begin to develop the idea of distribution? How does reasoning about distribution develop from the simplest forms to the more complex ones? What are instructional tasks and technological tools that promote the understanding of distribution? What are the common misconceptions involved in reasoning about distribution? How does an understanding of distribution connect and effect understanding of other statistical concepts and how does it relate to other kinds of statistical reasoning (e.g., reasoning about variation, covariation)? What are the difficulties that students encounter when working with, analyzing and interpreting distributions? What are ways to assess understanding of distribution? What are useful methodologies for studying the understanding of distributions? What type of understanding of distribution is sufficient for a statistically literate person?

These are just a few of the questions we wish to investigate in the Fourth International Research Forum on Statistical Reasoning, Thinking, and Literacy (SRTL-4). The focus of this gathering on reasoning about distribution has naturally emerged from the previous three conferences.