How Faithful Is Old Faithful? Statistical Thinking: A Story of Variation and Prediction

tatistics is a relatively new discipline. Only in the last one hundred years have common methods and common reasoning evolved that can be applied to data from many fields. In the early years, the field of statistics was influenced by the work of Ronald A. Fisher, Karl Pearson, and Jerz Neyman. They focused on developing tools and methods that primarily focused on randomization More recently, exploratory data analysis has been emphasized (Tukey 1977). As statistics continues to mature as a discipline, statistics educators are paying more attention to developing overall models of statistical thinking (Wild and Pfannkuch 1999). This shift in statistics means refocusing the emphasis in teaching from how to do statistics to how to think about statistics. In this next step in the evolution of statistics and statistics teaching, two questions arise: What is statistical thinking? and How can we develop students’ statistical thinking? The authors of this article have found that data sets from the Old Faithful geyser in Yellowstone Park furnish a rich context for introducing such important aspects of statistical thinking as the central role of variation and the importance of asking our students what they would predict. In this article, we first discuss the context of the data, next present a classroom exploration of the data, and then discuss the nature of statistical thinking as it pertains to this Old Faithful data set.