The authors analyzed the development of 4th-grade students' understanding of the transition from experimental relative frequencies of outcomes to theoretical probabilities with a focus on the foundational statistical concepts of variation and expectation. After observing the decreasing variation from the theoretical probability as the sample size…

Understanding what children know is paramount to planning effective science instruction; however, in any classroom, the students hold a variety of ideas. Representing these differences in ways that also acknowledge the common trends among students might facilitate the process of differentiation. To exemplify one such possible process of…