2013 Conference Proceedings - University of Nevada, Las Vegas

students are likely to interact with and make sense of the content. This domain addressesknowledge of misconceptions, common mistakes, and common points of confusion as well astopics that students find easy to learn. KCT is the knowledge of content as it relates toinstruction. It addresses effective sequencing of content during the completion of learning tasksas well as the content knowledge necessary for choosing appropriate examples.Figure 1. Domains of Mathematical Knowledge for Teaching (Ball, Thames, & Phelps, 2008)The research reported in this paper investigates pedagogical content knowledge for statisticsteachers. There is widespread agreement that teaching mathematics and teaching statistics, whilecertainly related, are distinctly different enterprises. In fact, Groth (2007) has proposed aframework for statistical knowledge for teaching. This framework describes the unique ways thatstatistics as the subject matter (the left side of Figure 1) influence both CCK and SCK. Drawingon the notion that context distinguishes statistics from mathematics, Groth makes explicit theways that both mathematical knowledge and nonmathematical knowledge must be activatedwithin CCK and SCK when teaching statistics.This present study focuses on the right side of Figure 1 in general, and KCS in particular.Specifically, I seek to deepen our understanding of the ways students understand and think aboutwhat makes a sample “good” in a simple statistical study. When considering the evidence fromProceedings of the 40 th Annual Meeting of the Research Council on Mathematics Learning 2013 78