Abstract

Elementary students' reasoning about data modeling is explored by conducting two design experiments. In the first design experiment, a class of fifth-grade students worked in six different design teams to develop hypermedia documents about Colonial America. Students compared the lifestyles of colonists with their own lifestyles. To this end, 10 "data analysts" developed a survey, collected and coded data, and used the dynamic notations of a computer-based tool, Tabletop (Hancock, Kaput, & Goldsmith, 1992), to develop and examine patterns of interest in their data. Our general approach was to let the reasoning and thinking displayed in one session with the data analysts provoke and steer the tasks and problems posed in the next session. Analysis of student conversations, including their dialogue with the teacher-researcher, indicated that the construction of data was an important preamble to description and inference. Moreover, students' ideas about many elements of data modeling were tied closely to forms of notation. In the second design experiment, two children and their classroom teacher were consulted about the use of a simple randomization distribution to test hypotheses about the nature of ESP. Here, experimentation afforded a framework for teaching about inference grounded by the creation of a randomization distribution of the students' data. We conclude that data construction and analysis provide an opportunity to involve students in the important enterprise of mathematical modeling.