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THE ROLE OF CONTEXT IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF STUDENTS' INFORMAL INFERENTIAL REASONING

The role of context is discussed in the setting of an extended curriculum development and research project in primary school designed to develop and study students' reasoning about statistical inference. Qualitative research methods are used to critically dissect the roles of context in the emergence of sixth grade students' informal inferential reasoning (IIR). Context is examined as part of a complex network of themes, such as inquiry, norms, knowledge of statistical concepts and tools, beliefs and expectations, and meaning making and explanations. The paper analyzes and discusses these themes and the role context plays in the emerging inferential reasoning of these students. OVERVIEW In this paper we study the role of context in learning to make Informal Statistical Inferences (ISI), which are probabilistic (non-deterministic) generalizations from data (Makar & Rubin, 2009). We briefly present a case study of a small group of sixth graders (age 12) working within an inquiry-based and technology-rich learning environment that was designed to promote students' Informal Inferential Reasoning (IIR, Ben-Zvi, Gil & Apel, 2007), the reasoning that underlies ISI. We briefly review the literature on IIR and context in statistics education. We use qualitative analysis methods to describe the role of context in the students' emerging IIR. When we discuss the results, we suggest that the classical distinction between data and context, although useful, represents only a partial picture of the complex processes of statistical reasoning. LITERATURE REVIEW