Mental representations of inferential statistics

The Journal of Mathematical Behavior has published an online article called "Exploring college students' mental representations of inferential statistics". The article is written by N.C. Lavigne, S.J. Salkind and J. Yan, and it reports a case study of how three college students made mental representations of their knowledge about inferential statistics. In the article, they discuss how this knowledge was connected and how it was applied in two problem solving situations. The researchers found that the representations of the students were based on incomplete statistical understanding, and their findings suggest that it could be useful as a diagnostic tool to modify the task format in certain ways.