Aspects of Students’ Reasoning About Variation in Empirical Sampling Distributions

Sampling tasks and sampling distributions provide a fertile realm for investigating students’ conceptions of variability. A project-designed teaching episode on samples and sampling distributions was team-taught in 6 research classrooms (2 middle school and 4 high school) by the investigators and regular classroom mathematics teachers. Results suggest that teachers explicitly need to focus on multiple aspects of distributions, especially on variability, to enhance students’ reasoning about sampling distributions.