Students' informal inferential reasoning (IIR) is often inconsistent with the normative logic underlying formal statistical methods such as Analysis of Variance (ANOVA), even after instruction. In two experiments reported here, student's IIR was assessed using an intuitive ANOVA task at the beginning and end of a statistics course. In both…

Two studies explored preschool children's beliefs about the relationship between perceptually based similarity among things and their predicted behaviors by focusing on form-function correspondences. Perceptual similarity, if motivated by intuitive beliefs about correspondences between form and function was found to be sufficient basis for…