Chapter 2: Toward Establishing a Learning Progression to Support the Development of Statistical Reasoning

Learning progressions articulate prospective means for nurturing the long-term development of disciplinary knowledge and dispositions. Establishing a learning progression is an epistemic enterprise: The goal is to position students to participate in the generation and revision of forms of knowledge valued by a discipline. Here we describe steps taken to establish a learning progression intended to support the development of middle school students’ reasoning about data and statistics by engaging them in practices of data modeling. Data modeling refers to the invention and revision of models of chance to describe the variability inherent in particular processes. The construction of the progression involved analysis of core concepts and practices of data modeling that were apt to be generative, yet intelligible, to students; conjectures about fruitful instructional means for supporting student learning developed in partnership with teachers; and the design and development of an assessment system that could be employed for both summative and formative purposes. Versions of the progression were investigated in a series of classroom design studies, first conducted by the designers of the progression and later by teachers who had not participated in the initial iterations of the design. The movement from initial conjectures to a more stabilized progression involved coordination as well as conflict among disparate professional communities, including teachers, learning researchers, and assessment researchers. Coordination and conflict among communities were mediated by a series of boundary objects, ranging from curriculum units to construct maps.