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ENGAGING YOUNG CHILDREN IN INFORMAL STATISTICAL INFERENCE

At the lower levels of schooling, students’ exposure to statistical concepts has been restricted to basic descriptive statistics. In recent years, however, leaders in mathematics education have advocated a much wider and deeper role for statistics in school mathematics. Reflecting the recent shift in statistics education research from a focus on specific skills and procedures towards a greater focus on statistical reasoning and thinking embedded in the process of a statistical investigation, the current study was designed to investigate ways in which the foundations of inferential reasoning can be laid at a very young age. This paper reports on how a group of young students formulated and evaluated data-based inferences. The term informal inference is used here to describe the drawing of conclusions from data that is based mainly on looking at, comparing, and reasoning from distributions of data.