Examining the Role of Context in Statistical Literacy Assessment

The Guidelines for Assessment and Instruction in Statistics Education (GAISE) College Report advocates for use of real data with context and purpose. This work contributes to the growing literature on assessing statistical literacy by investigating the influence of context as it relates to assessment performance among post-secondary introductory statistics students. We discuss the development of an isomorphic form of an existing assessment instrument, and report results which concluded that test takers demonstrated lower statistical literacy scores when assessment tasks incorporated real data from published studies as context when compared with functionally similar tasks such as those with a contrived data set and a realistic context.