• School Mathematics
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• v.19 no.3
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• pp.533-551
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• 2017

The statistical education researchers advise instructors to educate informal statistical inference and they are paying close attention to the progress of the statistical inference in general. This study was conducted by analyzing the levels and the traits of each levels of the informal statistical inference of the middle and high school students for comparing the samples of data and estimating the graph of a population. Research has shown that five levels of the informal statistical inference were identified for comparing the samples of data: responses that are distracted or misled by an irrelevant aspect, responses that focus on frequencies of individual data points and hold a local view of the sample data sets, responses that the student's view of the data is transitioning from local to global, responses that hold a global view but do not clearly integrate multiple aspects of the distribution, and responses that integrate multiple aspects of the distribution. Another five levels of the informal statistical inference were identified for estimating the graph of a population: responses that are distracted or misled by an irrelevant aspect, responses that focus only on representativeness, responses that consider both representativeness and variability and focus on one particular aspect of the distribution, responses that focus on multiple aspects of distribution but do not clearly integrate them, and responses that integrate multiple aspects of the distribution.