Reasoning about and making sense of
statistics and probability are essential to students’ future success. This
volume belongs to a series that supports NCTM’s Focus in High School
Mathematics: Reasoning and Sense Making by providing additional guidance for
making reasoning and sense making part of the mathematics experiences of all
high school students every day.
Six investigations illustrate how to help
high school students develop their skills in working with data. The
investigations emphasize the roles of reasoning and sense making in defining a
statistical question and collecting, analyzing, and interpreting data to answer
it. The authors examine the key elements of statistical reasoning
identified in Focus in High School
Mathematics: Reasoning and Sense Making and elaborate on the associated
reasoning habits.
The investigations show how
students can use these habits in analyzing data sets, constructing and comparing
representations of data, and using samples and simulations to gather data. They
reason about distributions of data and how to use measures of center, lines of
best fit, and other tools and techniques to detect trends, make predictions, and
determine the allowable scope of conclusions.
The development of statistical
reasoning must be a high priority for school mathematics. This book offers a
blueprint for emphasizing statistical reasoning and sense making in the high
school curriculum.
