Children’s Representation and Organisation of Data

This study investigated how children organised and represented data and also examined relationships between their organisation and representation of data. Two protocols, one involving categorical data and the other involving numerical data, were used to interview 15 students, 3 from each of Grades 1 through 5. Although there were differences between Grade 1 students and the rest, the study suggested that numerical data was significantly harder for children to organise and represent than categorical data. Children beyond Grade 1 could make connections between organising and representing data for categorical data but their connections for numerical data were more tenuous. The process of reorganising numerical data into frequencies was not intuitive for the children in this study but they showed greater readiness in recognising and interpreting data that had already been reorganised as a frequency representation. Given this latter result, a pedagogical approach that asks students to make links between raw data and a frequency representation of it may prepare students to create and construct their own frequency representations.