• Journal of Educational Research in Mathematics
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• v.23 no.4
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• pp.467-490
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• 2013

Correlation is a basic statistical concept which is necessary for understanding the relationship between two variables when they change values. In the middle school curriculum of Korea, only informal definition of correlation is taught with two-way data representations such as scatter plots and contingency tables. In this study, we investigated Korean high school students' understanding of correlation using a test consisting of 35 items about interpretation of scatter plot, contingency table, and text in realistic situation. 216 students from a high school in Seoul took the test for 20 minutes. From the results, we could observe the following: First, students did not have right criteria for determining the strength of correlation presented in scatter plots. Most of students could determine if there is correlation/no correlation and if the correlation is positive/negative by seeing the data presented in scatter plots. However, they did not judge by the closeness to the regression line but rather judged by the closeness between data points. Second, when statements about comparing the strength of correlation in the context of real life situation were given in text, the students had difficulty in understanding the distribution-related characteristic of the bi-variate data. Students had difficulty in figuring out the local distribution characteristic of data, which cannot be guessed merely based on the expression 'The correlation is strong' without statistical knowledge of correlation. Third, a large number of students could not judge the association between two variabels using conditional proportions when qualitative data are given in 2-by-2 tables. They made judgement by the absolute cell count and when the marginal sum of two categories are different for explanatory variable they thought the association could not be determined. From these results, we concluded that educational measures are required in order to remove such misconceptions and to improve understanding of correlation. Considering that the current mathematics curriculum does not cover the concept of correlation, we need to improve the curriculum as well.