Cognitive Development of Informal Inferential Reasoning

Research into cognitive development and proposing models to explain such development is invaluable for assisting educators in planning teaching sequences and assessing learning. In statistics education, research into models of cognitive development has expanded from dealing with general instructional models to models for assessing the development of reasoning and then, more recently, to models of reasoning about key statistical concepts such as variation and distribution. Interest amongst an international group of statistics education researchers has now focused on reasoning about statistical inference, in particular informal inference. This focus provided the theme for the 'Fifth International Research Forum on Statistical Reasoning. Thinking and Literacy', SRTL5, held in 2007. The eleven detailed research reports provided a broad basis for discussions at the forum. Subsequently, the ideas from five of these research reports were further developed and published in a special issue of the 'Statistics Education Research Journal', SER.I7(2). This paper presents a synthesis of this research. The range of research was based on participants from aged eight to adult.