Contemporary Curriculum Issues: Statistics in the Middle Grades: Understanding Center and Spread

The GAISE report emphasizes the importance of students having experience with statistical thinking throughout the pre-K-12 curriculum. Students' encounters with statistics in the middle grades should build on their foundational experiences from the elementary grades and provide a link to the inferential types of statistical thinking developed at the high school level. Middle-grades students should be actively involved in the statistical problem-solving process described in the GAISE report. That process involves (1) formulating a question that can be addressed with data, (2) collecting data to address the question, (3) analyzing the data, and (4) interpreting the results.