Primary school students ́ statistical reasoning when comparing groups

Abstract

This paper reports on the examination of group comparison strategies of primary school students in Germany (grade 4, age: 9-10 years), who were taught about group comparisons in a two-week statistics course. We present the design, the realization of the course and first empirical results of the evaluation. For the evaluation we gave the students a group comparison task before they attended the classroom activities and we gave them the same task after they had attended the classroom activities two weeks later. We collected the written notes from all students, analyzed the data with qualitative content analysis methods and compared the students ́ outcomes and strategies before and after the participation in the course. The results show that students show more elaborated group comparison strategies after attending the course.