Technology Design: The Movement of Means

In order to promote students’ conceptual understanding and learning experience in introductory statistics, a technology task, which focuses on the probability distribution in which means are defined, was created using TinkerPlots, an exploratory dataanalysis and modeling software. The targeted audiences range from senior high school grade levels to college freshmen who are starting their introductory course in statistics. Students will be guided to explore and discover the movement behaviors of means of a set of numbers randomly generated from a fixed range of values characterized by a predetermined probability distribution. The cognitive, mathematical, technological and pedagogical natures of the task, as well as its association with the statistics education framework based on the Guidelines for Assessment and Instruction in Statistics Education (GAISE) by the American Statistical Association, will be elaborated. A brief discussion on what cognitive design principles this task satisfies will also be provided at the end