Relationship between Vocabulary Knowledge and Conceptual Understanding in Introductory Statistics

Much research has gone to investigate the importance of underlying vocabulary knowledge of introductory statistics and how to help students improve their knowledge. However, the general relationship between higher level conceptual understanding and the underlying vocabulary knowledge of introductory statistics students has not being explored much. Using data analysis approach, we found that there appears a general positive correlation between higher level conceptual understanding and the underlying vocabulary knowledge, for introductory statistics, and also this correlation varies among topics. There is also some evidence that the performance of vocabulary knowledge can be used to predict the performance of higher level conceptual understanding