The Role of Context in Developing Reasoning about Informal Statistical Inference

Statistics education research is emerging as an important area of inquiry with multiple implications in school and tertiary curriculum design, instructional activities, technological tools that aid teaching and learning statistics, and teachers’ professional development. Over the past decade there has been an increasingly strong call for statistics education to focus more on statistical literacy, reasoning, and thinking. One of the main arguments presented is that traditional approaches to teaching statistics focus mainly on skills, procedures, and computations, which do not lead students to reason or think statistically. The papers in this Special Issue of Mathematical Thinking and Learning came out of discussions and presentations from the Sixth International Research Forum on Statistical Reasoning, Thinking, and Literacy (SRTL) in Brisbane, Australia in July 2009. SRTL is part of an international collaboration for research in statistics education that focuses on examining the nature and development of statistical literacy, reasoning, and thinking. SRTL organizes a series of biannual research forums since 1999 as an alternative to large conferences. The small size of these gatherings allows plenty of time for interaction and discussion of research data on a different clear thematic focus for each meeting with emphasis on qualitative analysis of classroom videos or interviews.