Teachers' Engagement with a Competing Models Informal Inference Task

Informal inference is a critical practice for students to engage in if they are to understand formal statistical methods. However, during informal inference students often utilize complex ideas that many in-service teachers are not prepared for as they have not had the opportunity to think deeply about statistics and develop statistical knowledge for teaching (Groth, 2013). Research shows that engaging teachers in authentic inquiry of content supports the development of that content knowledge, and there is an urgent need to do so through professional developments (PDs). However, there is limited literature concerning PDs in statistics education, and a dearth of research focusing on teachers' engagement with informal inference tasks. This paper describes in detail how two teachers engaged with a seminal informal inference task during a PD, including their reasoning about variability and sample size when making inferences. [For the complete proceedings, see ED606556.]