What is Unusual? The Case of a Media Graph

Three hundred and twenty-four middle school students considered a group of three graphs in a newspaper article about boating deaths. The graphs contained discrepancies and the students were asked to "comment on unusual features." This form of questioning produced a distribution of responses surprising to the authors and perhaps challenging to current goals for statistical literacy. Of these students, 201 answered the same question two years later and although overall performance improved to some extent there were still very few high level responses. The outcomes point to specific suggestions that can be made for middle school classrooms in line with the goals of statistical literacy. [For complete proceedings, see ED489632.]