Picturing student beliefs in statistics

Statistical skills and statistical literacy have emerged as important areas in education. While it has a rich mathematical basis, successful understanding and application of statistics incorporates other types of knowledge. In a similar way, beliefs about statistics can be described using the same framework as beliefs about mathematics, but statistical beliefs bring other aspects as well. This article describes a project for investigating student beliefs in statistics through the creation of pictures of understanding. It presents a classification of statistical concepts and attitudes which are motivated by research in statistical literacy and then shows how these can be refined to be more reliably applied in practice.