Chapter 6: Supporting Students’ Learning About Data Creation

Our purpose in this chapter is to analyze how students in one middle school classroom came to understand the data creation process and the importance of that process to the drawing of conclusions from statistical data. The data for this investigation were collected during two consecutive classroom design experiments that focused on statistical data analysis. The first design experiment occurred in a seventh grade mathematics classroom and the second, follow-up study was conducted with a smaller contingent of the same students in their eighth grade activity period. The analysis we present focuses both on the students’ developing understandings of data creation and on the means by which the emergence of these understandings was supported. As we document, the students did not anticipate ways in which the data creation process might affect their analysis at the beginning of the seventh grade design experiment. However, towards the end of the eighth-grade experiment, they seemed to have developed a relatively deep understanding of this relationship and played a far more active role in contributing to the data creation process.