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It is said that a picture is worth a thousand words, but what about graphs? Although graphs have the potential to bring data to life, numerous studies show that learners struggle with graphical comprehension. Furthermore, many textbook examples on graphs are boring and appear meaningless to students. Students want to know more about something which is interesting, meaningful, and worth knowing, in other words, something relevant. With the outbreak of the novel coronavirus in December 2019, COVID-19 is dominating the news worldwide, and the internet is flooded with visual presentations about the virus. To make statistics more fascinating and exciting, relevant and real-world data such as these can be used in the classroom to stimulate the learning of important statistical concepts such as graphs. Curcio's three levels of graphical comprehension were used as a framework in this study, while the importance of developing a global view on distributions was also emphasized.

A strong foundation in early number concepts is crucial for students' future success in statistics. Despite its importance in statistics, many first-year students struggle to comprehend the normal distribution due to a lack of basic number sense. Students get confused about the order and magnitude of negative z-scores on a standard normal curve or when problems about normally distributed random variables are presented in word questions which involve phrases that indicate inequalities. As a result, students shade wrong areas on the bell-shaped curve when they have to calculate probabilities for normally distributed variables. Visual representations such as the number line can support students' development of quantitative literacy or number sense by helping them create a mental representation of the order and magnitude of numbers as well as inequalities. Based on a comprehensive investigation of evidence demonstrating this weakness, this experienced-based perspective proposes a framework that demonstrates how the number line can be used as a powerful teaching tool to promote students' conceptual understanding about the normal distribution. The framework illustrates with authentic examples how the number line relates to the horizontal axis of the normal and standard normal curve and how it can be used to address erroneous quantitative reasoning when students are required to calculate probabilities for normally distributed variables. To determine if the number line teaching intervention affects student performance, the researcher adopted a non-equivalent pretest-posttest design with two intact classes. The results of the analysis show that students who received the intervention performed significantly better in the posttest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is said that a picture is worth a thousand words, but what about graphs? Although graphs have the potential to bring data to life, numerous studies show that learners struggle with graphical comprehension. Furthermore, many textbook examples on graphs are boring and appear meaningless to students. Students want to know more about something which is interesting, meaningful, and worth knowing, in other words, something relevant. With the outbreak of the novel coronavirus in December 2019, COVID‐19 is dominating the news worldwide, and the internet is flooded with visual presentations about the virus. To make statistics more fascinating and exciting, relevant and real‐world data such as these can be used in the classroom to stimulate the learning of important statistical concepts such as graphs. Curcio's three levels of graphical comprehension were used as a framework in this study, while the importance of developing a global view on distributions was also emphasized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]