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TRACKING THE DEVELOPMENT OF STATISTICS KNOWLEDGE IN INTRODUCTORY STATISTICS

Discussions of students’ understandings of key course concepts typically investigate those understandings at one point in time. This paper reports results from a case study in which eighteen graduate students were interviewed throughout a fifteen-week introductory statistics course. Knowledge structures were assessed once every three weeks, and changes in these structures were discussed. One key finding was that students’ understandings of certain course concepts change as the semester progresses, indicating that it may not be enough to assess these understandings at only one point in time. Two concepts in particular, mean and variance, are central to many ideas in the introductory course. Assessing how students “know” these concepts throughout the course may be beneficial to researchers and educators alike. Implications for both statistics education research and teaching introductory statistics are offered.