Thompson proposes to conduct a 40-month investigation of high school student learning difficulties when they participate in new instruction mehtods for probabilistic and statistical reasoning. It also investigates how teachers might be effectively engaged in the teaching of students how to reason stochastically. The project will focus on college-bound humanities-oriented high school students in a sememster course on probability and statistics using specifically designed activities and instruction. A second phase of the project will engage a group of high school teachers of Algebra I and Algebra II in rethinking how students learn from statistics instruction. A 4-week workshop for teachers will be held in the second phase. Data will collected by videotape, student interviews, teacher interviews, and from examples of teachers' written work.
Insights gained from the project will inform revisions of student and instructor materials. Results will be disseminated to researchers through articles in professional journals and to practitioners through trade journals and regional workshops.
