Addressing Cognitive and Situational Complexity in the Instruction and Assessment of Statistical Reasoning

The cognitive-theoretic instructional and assessment approaches described here represent our efforts to develop and measure students' abilities to reason spontaneously and flexibly with statistics in the context of complex real-world activity. We report results from two instructional projects based on situated cognition, in which students were taught statistical reasoning through guided participation in simulations of authentic professional activities requiring presentation and critique of statistical arguments. Although students’ statistical reasoning improved in selected ways, the approach was costly and difficult to implement and sustain. In search of more practical and powerful approaches, current experiments are investigating whether instruction based on video technologies and Cognitive Flexibility Theory can speed development of ability to think flexibly with statistics while seeing interacting themes in real-world situations.