ZDM Mathematics Education (2011) 43:723–736
DOI 10.1007/s11858-011-0347-0
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Developing conceptions of statistics by designing measures
of distribution
Richard Lehrer • Min-Joung Kim • Ryan Seth Jones
Accepted: 17 June 2011 / Published online: 2 July 2011
Ó FIZ Karlsruhe 2011
Abstract Students often learn procedures for measuring,
but rarely do they grapple with the foundational conceptual
problem of generating and validating coordination between
a measure and the phenomenon being measured. Coordi-
nating measures with phenomenon involves developing an
appreciation of the objects and relations in each as well as
establishing their mutual correspondence. We supported
students’ developing conceptions of statistics by position-
ing them to design measures of center and of variability for
distributions that they had generated through repeated
measure of a length. After students invented and explored
the viability of their measures individually, they partici-
pated in a public (whole-class conversation) forum
featuring justification and reflection about the viability of their
designed measures. We illustrate how individual invention
enticed students to attend to, and to make explicit,
characteristics of distribution not initially noticed or known
only tacitly. Conceptions of statistics and of relevant
characteristics of distribution were further expanded as
students justified and argued about the utility and
prospective generalization of particular inventions. Teachers
supported student learning by highlighting prospective
relations between characteristics of measures and charac-
teristics of distribution as they emerged during the course
of activity in each setting.
The opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not represent
views of the U.S. Department of Education or of the U.S. National
Science Foundation.
R. Lehrer (&)
M.-J. Kim
R. S. Jones
Vanderbilt University, Nashville, USA
e-mail: rich.lehrer@vanderbilt.edu
1 Introduction
Measurement is often conceived as a mundane activity, and
in school it typically arrives pre-formed. Students often
learn measurement procedures (Lee & Smith, 2011), but
rarely do they grapple with the foundational conceptual
problem of how to establish coordination between the
objects and relations of a particular phenomenon, its
structure, and with the corresponding symbolic, and often
material, objects and relations of its measure. This ‘‘black
box’’ quality of measure is often true of workplaces as well,
where the very success of the tools employed tend to
obscure the origins of the correspondences established
between measure and phenomena (Bakker, Wijers, Joinker
& Akkerman, 2011). Yet research in mathematics educa-
tion suggests that even young students can be supported to
investigate and understand relations between characteris-
tics of space, such as length and area, and aspects of their
measure, such as unit and scale (e.g., Clements & Bright,
2003). We sought to leverage this emerging tradition
of involving students in the conceptual foundations of
measurement in the less explored domain of statistical
reasoning. Statistics measure characteristics of distribution,
but as with other forms of measure, students often treat
statistics as matters of procedure (Zawojewski & Shaugh-
nessy, 2000).
Accordingly, we positioned 10- and 11-year-old students
to design measures of characteristics of distributed data,
such as their center and variability. Distribution is a key that
unlocks much of statistical reasoning (Cobb, 1999). Like
other measures, a statistic (a measure of a characteristic of a
distribution) represents a commitment to certain aspects of a
distribution at the expense of others. For example, the mean
statistic partitions the distribution into fair (equal) shares, so
that center is measured by the magnitude of a fair share. In
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contrast, the median attends to the order of the values and
ignores their magnitude, with the exception of the magni-
tude of the median value to represent the center. In previous
research, we found that when students invented statistics,
they typically engaged in a dialectic process of closer
examination of the characteristics of distribution (e.g., the
order of case values, the distance between a case value and
the center), coupled with struggles to develop measures
sensitive to these emerging characteristics (Lehrer & Kim,
2009; Lehrer, Kim & Schauble, 2007; Petrosino, Lehrer, &
Scahuble, 2003). In this report, we continue to examine the
learning potential of inventing measure by considering both
individual generation and collective reflection about these
individually invented measures, with an eye toward char-
acterizing the affordances of each setting for learning. We
first articulate how measure and phenomena are intertwined
in any setting. We then situate design of statistical measures
within a perspective of statistics education as learning to
model data. We describe three illustrative cases of statistical
invention, one in an individual setting, albeit with teacher
scaffolding, and the others in a collective setting featuring
presentation and reflection about the coordination between
the invented measure and characteristics of distributions.
The cases reveal the affordances of these distinct forms of
engagement for student learning. In both contexts, we were
especially interested in how teachers guided student design
and reflection.
1.1 History of measure: the problem of coordination
Throughout the historical development of knowledge that
is now codified by disciplinary boundaries, such as math-
ematics, sciences, engineering and technologies, measure
and theory were interlocking, so that measurement was one
of the principal ways in which knowledge was generated
(Crosby, 1997). Van Fraassen (2008) succinctly captures
the historic interpenetration of measure and of phenomena:
‘‘What counts as a measurement of (physical quantity) X?
and What is (that physical quantity) X? cannot be answered
independently of each other’’ (p. 116). He suggests
temperature as emblematic of this tangled relation. The
measure of temperature is now so ordinary that the only
novelty worth mentioning is when the reading exceeds or
falls below some threshold. But viewed historically, this
ordinary result represents the terminus of a long and
fractured span where both measure and phenomena were
contested (Chang, 2004). What was temperature? What
was the meaning of zero on a measurement scale? These
contests were eventually resolved by advances in both
theory, where the kinetic approach to ideal gases specified
relations among particles, velocity and temperature, and in
advances in measure material (e.g., indicators based on
different thermometric fluids).
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During formation, before the relation between theory
and measure has stabilized, measure is anything but
ordinary. It is this extraordinary quality, summarized by
Fig. 1, that we seek to employ to support learning. Grap-
pling with the measure of a phenomenon positions learners
to explore the objects and relations that constitute a
phenomenon and simultaneously to generate potential indi-
cators, and relations among these indicators, to constitute a
measure. A constant consideration is the correspondence
between indicators and relations in the measure space and
their counterparts in the space of phenomena. The arrows
displayed in Fig. 1 are intended to suggest that establishing
coordination between measure and phenomena is interac-
tive. This accords with the common sense notion that as
one attempts to measure something, one’s ideas about the
nature of the system being measured may change as well,
and transitions in understanding of a system may similarly
provoke transitions in how it is measured. Consider, for
example, a fundamental quality of a space such as area. As
one develops a measure of area, one learns to appreciate
additional qualities of area, such as its invariance under
dissection and re-arrangement, and the implication thereof
for the additivity of units of area. Viewing units of area
measure as additive supports reasoning about other possi-
ble configurations of the area bounded by a particular fig-
ure that conserve area (Lehrer, Jacobson et al., 1998). Ford
(2010) further suggests that issues of coordination between
measures and phenomena are sustained in communities
where there are clear advantages for rendering measure and
phenomena in ways that make them reproducible and
hence discursive objects for the community (see also,
Gooding, 1990). This suggests a need for collective as well
as individual forums for developing measure.
Fig. 1 Progressive elaboration of structure of measure and structure
of phenomena
Developing conceptions of statistics by designing measures of distribution
1.2 Situating statistical measure: statistics education
as modeling
The larger orientation toward data in which students
participated was one we term data modeling (Lehrer &
Romberg, 1996; Lehrer & Schauble, 2004; Konold &
Lehrer, 2008), illustrated in Fig. 2. As suggested by
inspection of Fig. 2, data modeling integrates inquiry, the
generation of data, chance and inference. The upper
triangle conveys the design phase of statistical investigation,
which begins with a question and includes determination
of which attributes of a phenomenon is suited best for
measures that may shed light on the question. The design
process involves a first-hand sense of measure, in which
the coordination between measure and phenomenon is
often contested, especially when designing a measure
calls into question the very nature of the attribute being
measured. Assuming that this first-hand sense of measure
has been resolved well enough for the purposes of a
particular inquiry (e.g., appropriate measures have been
either invented or appropriated), the lower triangle of
Fig. 2 depicts steps toward generating inference about the
question in light of uncertainty arising from chance var-
iation. Chance variation produces a distribution of mea-
surement values, which we commonly refer to as data.
Statistics are second-order measures of the distribution of
the resulting data. For example, the sample mean is a
measure of the distribution’s center, and the sample
standard deviation is a measure of the variability of the
distribution.
Revisiting Fig. 1, characteristics of distributions of data
play the role of phenomena and statistics play the role of
measures of these characteristics. A statistic is composed of
symbolic objects and relations that together function to
indicate aspects of the structure of a distribution. Consider,
for example, the range statistic. This statistic indicates the
variability of a distribution as the difference between the
highest and lowest case values. Although this correspon-
dence and rationale may appear transparent, it will have to
be established by learners. And it is by establishing and
perhaps reflecting upon such correspondences that learners
are positioned to better appreciate the rationale for con-
ventions established by the field—the particular coordina-
tion between statistic and characteristics of distribution
represented by that statistic. For example, students may
find that the range statistic itself may vary considerably
from sample-to-sample. Hence, other measures of vari-
ability may be preferred. Careful examination of the
affordances and constraints of measures in light of char-
acteristics of distribution is central to our instructional
design.
725
Posing Generating &
Questions SelectingAttributes
Constructing
Measures
Structuring Representing
Fig. 2 Data modeling integrates data, chance and inference
1.3 The instructional trajectory
In the instances of invented measure we report, students in
fifth- (age 10) and sixth-grade (age 11) classrooms each
measured the length of their teacher’s outstretched arms.
(See Lehrer & Kim, 2009 for a fuller description of the
instruction.) Our intention was to engage students in the
production of variability through measurement error as an
initial step for initiating statistical reasoning and as a
means for answering a simple question about the true
length of their teacher’s arm-span. Because they were
measure agents, students were positioned to think simul-
taneously about individual (i.e., a particular value) and
collective levels (i.e., the batch) of data. These levels
parallel the case and aggregate levels of all batches of data
but provide ready reference for the distinction in the con-
text of a process that is intelligible to students. Students
each repeated the measure with different tools, a change in
process that affected the variability of the resulting col-
lection. For example, measurements of a person’s arm-span
from a 15 cm ruler and from a meter stick typically form
distributions with near-identical centers, but with clear
distinctions in variability. Students’ independent measures,
recorded on sticky notes or index cards, were displayed on
a wall for the more variable measurements.
Small groups of students next invented paper-and-pencil
displays on chart paper that captured their sense of a
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‘‘pattern’’ or a ‘‘trend’’ that they noticed in the batch of
measurement data. The intention was to engage students in
structuring data and in the construction of the shape of the
data. That is, we anticipated that the configurations of the
data highlighted by each display would vary, thus provid-
ing teachers with an opportunity to engage students in a
conversation about how the choices made by designers
affected how the displays looked. Students did generate a
variety of displays, most of which bore little resemblance
to conventional displays, despite several years of exposure
to conventional representations in their schooling (Lehrer
et al., 2007). Students also considered how the shape of the
data might change if the process were repeated. This image
of repeated process is critical for longer term development
of statistical reasoning (Cobb & Moore, 1997; Thompson,
Liu, & Saldanha, 2007). Students often suggested that
outliers and other ‘‘mistakes’’ were unlikely to re-occur,
but because a person or an object has a definitive length,
the middle clump of the measurements, visible in only
some types of display, was apt to be repeated.
With this preamble, we challenged students to design
two different measures. We employ the notion of design to
foreground the construction of a method that would result
in a quantity indicating one or more characteristics of a
distribution. The first was a measure of the ‘‘best guess of
the real measurement.’’ This approach invited students to
consider a statistic as a measure of the signal of the batch
of measurement outcomes, here the true length of the
teacher’s arm-span (Konold & Pollatsek, 2002; Petrosino,
Lehrer, & Scahuble, 2003). The second challenge was to
design a measure of the ‘‘precision’’ of the batch of mea-
surements, so that students were positioned to develop an
indicator of variability. Student design was assisted by a
computer tool, TinkerPlots (Konold & Miller, 2005; Ko-
nold, 2007), which facilitated the structuring and display of
the original measurements of arm-span.
Although the instructional trajectory went on to engage
students in the construction of models of chance to account
for the observed variability of measurements, our analysis
focuses on this point of the trajectory, which typically
spanned 2 h of instruction. Our aim is to illustrate the
affordances of the individual and collective settings for
learning by considering how students resolved the problem
of developing coordinating measure-statistic and phenom-
ena-distribution in each. We illustrate this process of
coordination by describing three cases. The first illuminates
individual invention as a student developed a measure of
the true length of her teacher’s arm-span, during which
initial intuitions about the importance of the center clump
of the data guided invention of a measure of center. The
second and third cases illuminate how the process of col-
lective negotiation about the uses and limitations of an
invented measure augmented students’ conceptions of both
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measure and distribution. In all three cases, teachers sup-
ported student invention and contest. Hence, in each case,
we describe forms of teacher support that appeared to
bootstrap productive learning in each setting.
2 Methods
2.1 Participants
Students were in one fifth- and two sixth-grade classrooms,
corresponding to ages 10 and 11, respectively. The fifth-
grade classroom was located in an urban school in the
southeastern region of the United States. These students
were ethnically diverse (e.g., in one sixth-grade classroom
the students included recent immigrants from Africa, Ku-
rdistan, and Mexico, as well as African-American, Asian-
American, European-American, Hispanic-American, and
Native-American students). The first author served as the
teacher for these students, and the case of individual
invention is drawn from this classroom. Other students
were sixth-graders (n = 95: female = 45, male = 50),
who attended a middle school (grades 6–8) in the Mid-
western region of the United States where nearly all
students were of European descent. Their teacher was not a
participant in the research reported elsewhere. The teacher
had 10 years of teaching experience at this grade level, and
a total of 26 years in the profession. He agreed to partici-
pate in our efforts to expand the reach of the work beyond
its initial context of development. The teacher taught four
classes, and the cases of collective measure are drawn from
two of these classes.
2.2 Data sources
2.2.1 Case one: inventing a statistic
From a catalogue of video recordings of invented statistics
developed in our previous research (e.g., Lehrer et al.,
2007; Lehrer & Kim, 2009), we selected an episode of
invention that occurred during a relatively brief span of
time, yet that clearly illuminated a student’s attempts to
grapple with the coordination of the structure of the mea-
sure (an invented median) with observed, tangible char-
acteristics of distribution. The teacher’s role was also
visible in this episode, which we viewed as important for
clarifying that invention is not intended as a synonym for
discovery.
2.2.2 Cases two and three: reflecting upon a statistic
We identified 10 episodes of measure reviews of student-
invented statistics of precision in the classrooms of the
Developing conceptions of statistics by designing measures of distribution 727

sixth-grade teacher who had not participated in the previ-
ous studies. Within each of these episodes, a student shared
his or her invented statistic, and the teacher moderated a
whole-class discussion. The average length of these dis-
cussions was 12 min, with the longest lasting about 20 min
and shortest, about 1 min (at the end of a class). Of these,
we selected two episodes that represented common, yet
distinct approaches seen in students’ invented measures of
variability: range and deviation from center. Student–stu-
dent and student–teacher interactions during the measure
reviews were video recorded with a single camera located
at the back of the room.
2.3 Analysis
Video records of classroom interactions for each case were
transcribed following Jeffersonian transcription notation
(Jefferson, 1984), and were linked to video so that we
could also view participants’ gaze and gestures, to the
extent feasible by the placement of the camera. The Jef-
fersonian conventions followed included use of underline
to indicate emphasis in speech, = to indicate the break
and subsequent continuation of interrupted speech, (# of
seconds) to indicate pauses in speech with (.) indicating a
pause of less than 0.5 s, ((italic text)) to indicate gestures or
descriptive commentary, [ ] to indicate the start and end
points of overlapping speech, \ [to indicate more slowly
delivered speech, [ \ to indicate more rapidly delivered
speech, ° ° to indicate quite speech, ::: to indicate pro-
longation of an utterance, . or ; to indicate falling pitch, ?
or : to indicate rising pitch, - to indicate an abrupt half or
interruption in utterance, and (hhh) to indicate audible
exhalation.
For each conversational turn, we inferred the nature of
knowledge that appeared to be revealed by participant talk
and gesture. We were oriented toward sequences of turns,
or exchanges, that either established or that indicated
uncertainty about the coordination between an invented
statistic and one or more characteristics of the distribution.
We tracked shifts in the conceptual grounds of these
exchanges, using these shifts to mark the termination of
one exchange and the beginning of another. To make the
trajectory of conceptual change more visible, we rendered
the transcripts of these conversational exchanges as nar-
rative and tabular summaries. These summaries repre-
sented the topical shifts in disciplinary knowledge about
distribution and/or statistic. To illustrate this process of
summarization, we apply it to a portion of the transcript
from the beginning of the second case presented.
The exchanges represented in Table 1 were grounded in
a shared visual reference generated by the teacher who
displayed, via computer projection, graphs of the mea-
surements taken with more and less precise tools. By
exchange, we refer to one or more turns of conversation
that shared a common goal or topic. Here, in the first turn,
we observed a coordination between reading the display,
which for John indicated agreement among measurers, and
the measure-statistic, the range. This constituted the first
exchange. We also noted the coordination between an
imagined state of display (one column or stack of values)
and the implication that the resulting measure would be
zero (turns 3–11). This constituted the second exchange.
Accompanying the narrative description of the turns was a
tabular form of representation for each exchange, later
displayed in Table 3, to help readers coordinate visually
the role of the teacher, the nature of the measure proposed,

Table 1 Example of a transcript: initial exchanges in a measure review

Turn Speaker Utterances

01 John So um my my method was to first find the range of your data and um to find out how much um how ho:::w much the graph or
the people agree is uh the range is the key. Um. If the range would be like one like stack= ((moving his right hand up and
down))
02 Teacher That.
03 John =it would be the range would be zero and like zero is the best? Sort of like grading of it? And then.
04 Teacher So zero is good. I am guessing then lower number is good.
05 John [Lower number is really good.]
06 Teacher [Does anybody have question ] on what he just said so far? I will tell you why you need to question him because this gonna be
part of your assignment today cause you are gonna apply one of these things. If you don’t understand what anybody up there
says you need to a:::sk. Okay.
07 John So it’s like zero is the best grading or best range and then infinity?
08 Teacher ((laughing))
09 John Infinity is like the worst.
10 Teacher Ya. Infinity would be horrible. Basically you are telling me that the lower the number the better it is.
11 John Exactly.

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and the characteristics of the distribution during each
exchange. Both the narrative and tabular forms of summary
omitted other qualities of the interaction that were avail-
able in the fuller transcription, especially the emotional
valences of the participants (e.g., jokes, laughter) and
indicators of commitment and involvement in the interac-
tions (e.g., ‘‘exactly!’’).
3 Results
The results of the summaries of interaction in each setting
are described, first in the setting of inventing measure and
then in the setting of the measure review.
3.1 Inventing a measure of center: the half spot
Recall that prior to invention of statistics, students invented
displays of the batch of measurements of their teacher’s
Fig. 3 Alina’s visually guided intuition about the location of the true
measure
arm-span. Figure 3 is a facsimile of the display constructed
by the student featured in this case study, Alina. The nature
of the display constituted an important resource for Alina’s
efforts to invent a measure of the best guess of her tea-
cher’s arm-span. Moreover, in whole-class conversation
preceding this episode of invention, Alina suggested that
the outcomes on the ends of the distribution would be less
likely to appear again, if measurers were more careful in
their measuring procedure. Hence, both the display that she
constructed and her sense of the relative reliability of
particular case values likely informed Alina’s construction.
The episode of invention (see Table 2 for a summary of
the episode) was initiated as her teacher asked: ‘‘What is
your best sense about what it (her teacher’s arm-span)
really is?’’ Alina’s response was linked to the display: She
emphatically enclosed with her hands the center clump of
values in the 150s cm interval displayed in Fig. 3. Alina’s
gesture indicated that the aspect of the distribution that she
attended to was the center clump. Her initial ‘‘measure’’
was that of literal enclosure of the region with her hands.
In the next exchange (2), the teacher protested that Alina
had indicated a region, not a particular value, a reminder
that the measure should result in a quantity. Alina
responded by shrinking the span enclosed by her hands to
converge on the middle of the neighborhood of values,
suggesting that it must be 155 (cm). Hence, the measure
was transformed from a neighborhood of values, the center
clump, into a quantity representing the mid-point of that
clump.
In the exchange (3) that followed, the teacher invoked
disciplinary criteria of communication and generalization
for measure. He asked Alina to create an algorithm
(‘‘rules’’) for ‘‘someone else’’ so that they would arrive at
the same value (155 cm), and he further set a goal that the
algorithm should ‘‘work for any batch of data (to get a
middle number). Like if we measured again, it would work

Table 2 The case of Alina: emerging coordination between measure and characteristics of distribution
Exchange Teacher role Nature of measure Focal characteristics of distribution

1 Set a goal of finding a best
guess of a teacher’s arm-
span
2 Conveyed a conventional
view of a measure: a
measure is a quantity
3 Set criteria for measure:
clear communication and
generalization
4 Sought clarification of result
of algorithm
5 No explicit support but prior
history of instruction
about symmetry
Region of values that were enclosed by her
hands
Coordinated gestural sweep from top and
bottom of center clump with intersection at
middle of center clump
Algorithm employed order and interval-
group to generate a middle number
Imagined generalization of algorithm to
other batches of data
Interval, order, and count of intervals to
locate the mid-point of the center clump
Center clump
Mid-point of ordered list of the values contained in
the center clump
Considered entire distribution with properties of
ordered values within intervals of size 10
Existing data was one instantiation of a repeated
process
The center clump was coordinated with its measure
by appeal to symmetry. First explication of shape of
distribution as symmetric

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on that batch too. So what do we do?’’ Alina’s response
was to write ‘‘directions’’ in a manner that she character-
ized as ‘‘like Star Logo,’’ a computer programming
language. These directions included organizing the data to
partition it into groups of 10, and to order the data from
least to greatest within each group. This exchange with the
teacher resulted in two forms of transformation, one per-
taining to measure and the other to distribution. In the
measure world, Alina’s reliance on her own agency was
supplanted by an algorithmic third-person voice by analogy
to a computer program. Historically, this has been an
important step in the development of mathematics (Ber-
linski, 2000; Rotman, 2000). The result transformed the
measure space to include explicit symbolization of the
interval and order characteristics of the display, so that
the foundations of the measure were no longer dependent
on indexing by hand and sweep of hand to locate the center
clump. This transition in the objects and relations in the
measure world was accompanied by a renewed focus on
the entire batch of data, enlarging the scope of distribution.
Alina suggested (exchange 4) that the next step in the
directions would be to find the ‘‘half spot,’’ which the
teacher assumed to mean a reference to her previous
indicator of the mid-point of the center clump. So the
teacher asked if that meant that the directions would always
locate the group with the most values (the highest relative
frequency). Instead of agreeing with the teacher, Alina
responded that this might not occur, mentioning that if the
measurements were repeated, there might be ‘‘a few less
values in the 150’s and a few more in the 160’s.’’ That is,
she was ‘‘seeing’’ the existing sample as one of many
that could be generated by the process of measuring the
teacher’s arm-span, perhaps cued by the earlier classroom
conversation about the potential outcomes of repeating the
process by which the measurements were generated.
In the next exchange (5), Alina sought to reconcile her
initial sense of mid-point of the highest frequency clump
with her emerging algorithm for measuring the half spot.
Alina’s innovation was to use counts of intervals to the left
and right of the interval with the highest relative frequency
of cases: ‘‘to find our half spot, we counted on each side the
number we had’’ illustrating that there were four groups to
the left of the 150s and four to the right. She justified this
use of counting by appeal to reflection symmetry, literally
folding the display to demonstrate that the highest fre-
quency interval constituted the line of reflection and that
the distribution was (nearly) symmetric about this interval.
Hence, the original mid-point indexed by gesture could
now be indicated by a replicable process of grouping,
ordering, and counting.
Table 2 summarizes the transitions and coordinations
between the measure constructed by Alina and the aspects
of distribution attended to during each state of measure.
729
During these five exchanges, Alina sought to render into
measure her intuition that the real length of her teacher’s
arm-span would be best estimated by considering the
center clump of the distribution. As she constructed her
measure, she considered how the properties of interval and
order that were constituents of her display could be
exploited to develop a mechanical (algorithmic) process
that others could also employ to find a middle value, or half
spot. Alina’s consideration of the imagined results of a
repetition of the process by which the batch of data of
measurements was generated grounded her anticipations of
how the measure might change in light of sample-to-sam-
ple variation. The role of her teacher included reminding
Alina of the need to create a quantity for purposes of
measure. He also supported the disciplinary virtues of clear
communication and generalization as desirable qualities of
measure.
Although Alina’s invention was not as general or as
easily replicated as conventional measures of center, it
contained the seeds of more powerful conventional statis-
tics by virtue of its reliance on count and order. The visual
display highlighted the symmetry of the distribution, which
supported the press made by the teacher to generate a
quantity to measure a location (here a value along the axis
of reflection). Subsequent to this exchange, Alina revised
the scope of count to act on ordered cases instead of
ordered intervals, but it is likely that this further innovation
was borrowed from other classmates who invented the
median. Yet Alina’s prior efforts to invent a measure
positioned her to understand the virtues of counting
ordered cases rather than ordered intervals. Parenthetically,
the invention of median precipitated another measurement
quandary in the classroom: The middle number (157 cm),
the median, no longer corresponded to any particular
measured value (there were 24 cases). This was an
important step in the development of measure, because it
suggested that a measure need not copy to adequately
represent a characteristic of a distribution. When pressed to
justify the use of an in-between value as an indicator of the
true length, the student inventors appealed to the consis-
tency of the in-between value with neighboring values, so
even if no measurer obtained that measure, it could serve as
a plausible estimate of true length. This justification was
reminiscent of Alina’s reliance on neighborhoods of val-
ues, center clumps, and suggested to us that displays that
make this characteristic of distribution visible are apt to
afford opportunities to reason about center statistics as
‘‘middle numbers.’’ It should be noted that the dependence
of this sense of middle on order was not transparent to all
students in the class. When given an unordered list of
values, some students simply found the middle of the list
and suggested that this was the median. However, these
moments proved to be productive failures (Kapur, 2008)
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that provided pedagogical opportunity to revisit the struc-
ture of both the characteristic at hand (center), and the
corresponding measure (median), and to ground the
necessary coordination between order and count in this
correspondence.
3.2 Reflections on inventions: range
As previously mentioned, after inventing a statistic, stu-
dents participated in a whole-group conversation, here
termed a measure review, during which the inventor
explained and justified her or his invention. Other students
were free to ask questions about, or even challenge, the
inventor’s explanations or justifications, but they were also
accountable for understanding how the inventor’s measure
functioned, both conceptually and procedurally. We turn
now toward illustrating how this process of measure review
functioned to further elaborate students’ conceptions of
statistics and of distribution. In this instance, a sixth-grade
student, John, presented his invention of range as an indi-
cator of the precision of measure. (The precision of mea-
sure is conventionally the reciprocal of its variability, but
this distinction was not made by either the teacher or the
participating students.) The teacher staged this particular
measure review using TinkerPlots to display two distribu-
tions of the measures of the arm-span of a teacher, illus-
trated in Fig. 4. The upper panel represents measurements
obtained with a meter stick and the lower panel, mea-
surements obtained with a 15 cm ruler. The teacher initi-
ated the review by reminding the students that the goal was
to talk about their inventions, ‘‘kinda like the best guess
methods, but we call this the best precision methods.’’
In the first exchange (1), John immediately established a
coordination between reading the display as showing ‘‘how
much the graph or the people agree’’ and his proposed
Fig. 4 TinkerPlots display of
the measurements of a teacher’s
arm-span employing a meter
stick (top panel) and a 15 cm
ruler (bottom panel)
123
R. Lehrer et al.
measure, ‘‘the range of your data.’’ He went on in this turn
and the one following (2) to suggest minimum (zero) and
maximum, (infinity) values of the scale of measure, and he
justified these values by performing, with gesture and
word, imagined transformations of the data. He declared
that a measure of zero corresponded to complete agree-
ment, indicated by a single column of values. A scaled
value of infinity, ‘‘the worst,’’ would occur as the extreme
values of the data moved away from the center with infinite
extension. Other than stage setting, the teacher reminded
the class of norms of collective responsibility for asking
questions whenever the method or its grounds were not
clear.
The next exchange (3) was dominated by explorations of
the procedure to generate indicators of precision. Several
students tried out the statistic and quickly reached
consensus that values of the statistic appropriately corre-
sponded with the degree of agreement evident by visual
inspection of the displays in Fig. 4. We anticipated that this
would conclude this particular measure review, but Ethan
soon challenged the premise of coordination between the
range and precision during the next exchange (4). He
proposed, plausibly in light of students’ own efforts to
measure their teacher’s arm-span, a transformation of
the distribution in the upper panel of Fig. 4 to generate a
‘‘two-way’’ outlier, meaning that both displays would
have similar extreme cases. John’s immediate reaction was:
‘‘It doesn’t matter.’’ To support Ethan’s proposed trans-
formation, the teacher used TinkerPlots to animate it,
resulting in the display shown in Fig. 5.
The teacher then asked a question to motivate further
contest (exchange 5). He asked whether or not the ‘‘brown
graph (upper panel) still tends to agree more?’’ Looking at
the display, Alex responded that the graph in the upper
panel indicated greater agreement ‘‘cause its smaller,’’ a
Developing conceptions of statistics by designing measures of distribution
Fig. 5 ‘‘What if’’ we move
these two values?
reference to the extent of spread that he saw. But in the
next turn of conversation, Ethan objected to Alex’s visually
guided interpretation by exclaiming: ‘‘Not now! Not by his
(John’s) way.’’
The next few turns of the conversation revolved around
the contradiction between the range measure and the
qualities of the distribution evident by visual inspection.
Clear differences in the variability of the data were now not
reflected by a measure that relied on only two values.
In the next exchange (6), like any good inventor, John
proposed a patch to the measure, one of trimming an outlier
in each tail of the distribution of values. Some students
agreed, but Ethan again objected, pointing out that perhaps
it was not appropriate to remove outliers: ‘‘(they) aren’t
outliers by some people I mean.’’ Ethan’s objection seemed
to suggest that what might be one person’s outlier was
another person’s valid measurement. Other students won-
dered about the effects of multiple outliers.
The teacher decided that the conversational exchange
presented an opportunity for further development of dis-
ciplinary values of coherence and communicative clarity.
Accordingly, he continued the conversation (exchange 7)
by animating an unrestricted truncation (‘‘keep chopping it
down’’), by removing cases symmetrically until he had
achieved an absurd result of reaching the median (which
was identical) for each distribution. This demonstrated the
need to clarify and codify the truncation repair. But, as
the teacher concluded, ‘‘there is nothing wrong with the
range,’’ as he emphasized that the purpose was to examine
the circumstances in which it would serve as good measure.
Table 3 summarizes the trajectory of the conversation,
which began with an almost ideal grasp of measure by its
author: John clearly related properties of measure to
properties of distribution associated with its variability, and
731
he further established values indicating minimum and
maximum precision, along with the entailments of each for
imagined displays of data. Classroom reflections extended
the conception of the validity of the range statistic by
considering circumstances that might diminish its corre-
spondence with characteristics of the distribution (its
clumpiness) that were constituents of variability. The
teacher’s role was one of animating some of the transfor-
mations imagined by students with the display technologies
of TinkerPlotsTM. In addition, at critical moments he
supported dissent, allowing for the development of the
space of imagined transformations. The teacher pursued
disciplinary values of communicative clarity and coherence
by pursuing the paradox raised by measures whose values
did not correspond to perceptually clear differences in
variability.
3.3 Reflections on inventions: deviation
The second measure review, conducted in another class
taught by the same sixth-grade teacher, featured explora-
tion of another student-invented measure, the sum of
deviations of measured values from the sample median.
The duration of this review was much longer, so we have
selected only exchanges involving explicit coordination of
the statistic with qualities of variability. The teacher again
staged the conversation with the display depicted in Fig. 4,
and he reminded the class of norms of sense making (‘‘And
you guys are listening for does this make sense?’’) and
generalization (‘‘Could I do this on other data?’’).
In the first exchange, the student designer, Adam, pro-
posed a deviation-based approach to precision that relied
on the distance between each case and the median and
represents the precision as the sum of these deviations:
123
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Table 3 Summary of the measure review of John’s method

Exchange Teacher role Nature of measure Attended characteristics of distribution

1 Set the stage by sharing visual reference
and reminding of norms governing
measure review
2 Teacher adopted John’s voice to
highlight the measure of zero and its
correspondence to complete
agreement/no variability
3 Solicited other participants to test the
claims
4 Animated transformation of data
5 Created tension by highlighting the
contrast between ‘‘seeing’’ and
measuring
6 No explicit teacher support
7 Privileged value of algorithm that
included clear guidance about
trimming
Range
Minimum, maximum values of scale
Calculated values for empirical
samples
Correspondence between range and
qualities of distribution challenged
Explored generalization of measure
Truncated range
Revised measure must include
stopping rule for truncation. Range
may not account for clumps or
regions of values
How much people agreed was indicated by
clumps in the data
Complete agreement indicated by one stack of
data on display, corresponding to a measure
of zero
Complete disagreement indicated by imagined
smear of data, infinite measure
Checked correspondence between obtained
values and observed clumps of data
An imagined distribution with extreme values
but high amount of clumping
The imagined transformation created a
tension—students ‘‘saw’’ that the
distributions were comparatively more or less
variable, but the statistic was now no longer
sensitive to these differences
Trimmed values were removed from the
distribution
Distribution recharacterized by regions of
values, some of which may be more
important for purposes of measuring
precision

‘‘So were gonna find for our thing were gonna find for zero’’), which he again coordinated with an imagined
each data point ((pointing with index figure at a location (‘‘can’t be anywhere away from the median’’).
case)) were gonna find how far away each data point Following several other exchanges in this spirit, the
is from the median ((gestures with hand)). Like how teacher invited (exchange 5) students to disrupt the coor-
far each individual one is. And then we add that up dination between statistic and variability previously
for each thing (each deviation) and that shows it established (‘‘Can anyone think of any time that this might
(precision) for ours.’’ become a problem?’’). A pair of students proposed another
imagined distribution, identical to the extant data but with
Other members of the class did not understand Adam’s
one difference (‘‘one outlier that is like way far away and
explanation, so the teacher created data consisting of a few
then everything else is clumped’’). Acting on this imagined
cases and a median. Adam demonstrated his method with
distribution, Jeff illustrated how Adam’s method would
this small batch (exchange 2), and most students indicated
convey the misleading impression that the measurements
that they now understood Adam’s method. The teacher
were ‘‘not as precise.’’
asked about the direction of the difference (negative vs.
The teacher (exchange 6) elaborated on Jeff’s proposed
positive) and Adam clarified that he was interested in the
scenario by aligning himself and the class with it: ‘‘We
absolute value of the deviations, not their direction.
pick a ridiculous number like a thousand.’’ By choosing an
In the next exchange (3), Adam further clarified his
extreme case, the teacher illustrated Jeff’s concern with a
measure by aligning the resulting sums of deviations as
common heuristic employed in mathematical reasoning,
measures of precision with reference to an ideal, imagined
extreme case. The conversation turned toward debates
state (‘‘zero is most precise’’) of complete alignment of all
about the role of the outlier. Some students proposed
values with one location.
eliminating it because it is so distinctive, while others
When the teacher invited questions (exchange 4), many
argued that a measure of spread should indicate how much
students responded that they liked the measure, because it
‘‘all of the measurements’’ tend to agree, thus justifying the
clearly coordinated the measured quantity with the shared
outlier’s effect on the measure. This debate so engaged the
sense of which display exhibited (‘‘you can see’’) greater
students that as the teacher received a call on the telephone
precision. During this exchange, Adam again reminded the
from the office some of the students continued to negotiate
class of the anchor of the scale (‘‘the precisest one is

123
Developing conceptions of statistics by designing measures of distribution 733

Table 4 Summary of the measure review of Adam’s method

Exchange Teacher role Nature of measure Characteristics of distribution

1 Staged distributions Set norms
2 On-the-spot creation of example
distribution. Highlighted absolute
value
3 No explicit teacher support
4 Invites questions
5 Invites problematic
6 Poses extreme case
Sum of deviations from center
Method to calculate demonstrated
Minimum value
Communicative clarity. Minimum
value
Outlier may result in lack of
correspondence between measure
and precision
Outlier’s effect on measure is more
evident
Variability as distance
Distance coordinated center and case, absolute value,
not signed differences
Imagined distribution of all values at same location
Measure aligns with visual perception of extant
distributions. Imagined distribution of all values at
the median
Imagined copy of distribution but with an outlier
Imagined copy of distribution but with a ‘‘ridiculous’’
outlier

the measures value in light of the effect of the outlier.
Table 4 summarizes the trajectory of this measure review.
As in the previous measure review, students were sen-
sitive to the need to establish the quality of the precision
statistic by coordinating measure values with observed and
with imagined states of variability. The imagined states of
variability include plausible transformations as well as
those generated for the sake of the argument—the ‘‘ridic-
ulous’’ number suggested by the teacher. The contest
around outliers and their effect on the sum of deviations
was extended the next day by the teacher, who suggested a
further problematic by again posing two different distri-
butions, one with a large number of cases but with little
variability and the other with a small number of cases and a
comparatively large degree of variability. In this imagined
scenario, the sum measure did not correspond to the spread
of data visible in the displays. We mention this to highlight
that the measure reviews produced multiple opportunities
for students to reconcile disrupted correspondence between
characteristics of distribution and measures of the charac-
teristics, many more than could be represented here.
4 Discussion
Our aim in the research program reported here was to
design instruction that positioned students to participate in
the dialectic of measure—the emerging relation between
the structure of a measure and the structure of the phe-
nomena being measured—by posing the challenge of
designing statistics of their own invention. By participating
in this dialectical process, we anticipated that students
would explore much of the conceptual terrain encompassed
by the discipline’s treatment of statistic and distribution. In
this, we were not disappointed. Students traversed much of
the terrain as they grappled with the tension between
generating a quantity and understanding whether or not that
quantity was an adequate measure of the desired charac-
teristic of the distribution, or even whether the character-
istic of the distribution indicated by the measure was in fact
the most desirable. For example, in the case of individual
invention, the student’s initial sense of measure was one of
gestural enclosure of a region of case values. The particular
region selected was guided by the display the student had
previously developed, which structured distribution into
decade intervals and ordered the values within each dec-
ade. Hence, the student began with a clear intuition that the
referent of the measure, the real length of her teacher’s
arm-span, was apt to be located in the middle region of the
graph. Yet, this gesture was not a quantity, and the stu-
dent’s next step was to locate, again by hand, the middle
value within the region. Reminded that this process was not
reproducible by others, the student constructed an algo-
rithm that would allow other members of the class to locate
the same value as representing the ‘‘1/2 spot.’’ As she
constructed the algorithm, the structure of the distribution
that was previously tacit was made explicit, as she
employed count of ordered intervals to identify the critical
region. Somewhat unexpectedly, she also anticipated the
effects on the measure of other samples drawn from the
same process, indicating that her sense of the structure of
the distribution was such that she expected some variability
in the center if the process were repeated. She justified her
algorithm by appealing to the symmetry of the distribution,
literally demonstrating reflection symmetry around the line
of reflection defined by her choice of center. The process of
invention was dialectical in the sense that her initial mea-
sure fell short of disciplinary demands of measurement,
and this insufficiency appeared to generate closer attention
to the characteristics of distribution. These characteristics

123
734
were then exploited to generate a method of measure that
could be reproduced and communicated. As we indicated,
the use of interval bootstrapped the development of the
measure, and in subsequent revision (the next day) was
eliminated by relying on counts of cases rather than counts
of intervals to find the 1/2 spot. This revision was not
trivial, especially because it identified a different value as
the middle, a value that did not exist in the data. As with
other acts of invention, this quandary provided pedagogical
opportunities for the class. During this act of invention, the
teacher was not a passive observer but instead engaged in
disciplinary dialogue during which he represented values
of communicative clarity, reproducibility and generaliza-
tion, and the role of algorithm as a means to encapsulate
these values. We believe that it is important to provide
students with enough timely support and sufficient leeway
to generate their own measures so that the essential tension
between statistic and distribution is maintained. A signa-
ture of sufficient tension is successive waves of student
revision, as demonstrated so clearly by this case of
invention.
The cases described illuminate a repeated finding
across several studies: As students design statistical
measures, their resolutions to the challenges of quantifi-
cation have many parallels in statistical convention. For
example, as we reported, students’ invented measures of
precision included notions of the distance between end-
points of the distribution and of distance between case
and center. In the discipline, these conceptions of vari-
ability find their counterparts in the range and in average
deviation, although the latter is defined by the mean
rather than by the students’ choice of median deviation.
Inventing measures also supported the development of
what we term meta-measure competency (related to
diSessa’s (2004) construct of meta-representational com-
petency), meaning that students appeared increasingly to
generate epistemic criteria for what counted as a good
measure. Some of these criteria were very general, and
we suspect that students might be disposed to invoke
them in other systems of measure. For example, students
often demanded that other students define and clarify the
structure of a statistic in a manner that could be readily
communicated and replicated by people other than its
inventor. Moreover, although students often struggled
with the notion of creating a quantity to represent a dis-
tribution of quantities, there were multiple occasions
where students claimed that a measure was adequate,
because there was a correspondence between the quantity
generated by the measure and the quality of the distri-
bution being measured. Students often demanded too that
measures be general and not tied to particular circum-
stances, as seen in the use of imagined distributions to
contest the measures.
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R. Lehrer et al.
4.1 The promise of measure reviews as classroom
activity structures
As Ford (2010) notes, systems of measure do not develop
in soliloquy, but instead gain traction through their par-
ticipation in a wider collective where they are challenged
and refined. Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner & Cain (1998)
note that such forms of collective, figured worlds, take
shape within and grant shape to the co-production of many
forms of social activity. But in realms of measurement, the
collective focus has an additional impetus of reproduc-
tion—to participate in a measure discourse, one must be
able to frame a measure as reproducible by its participants.
Such explicitness then allows for opposition, as members
envision circumstances or visions of phenomena not cap-
tured by the measure. In each case of measure review, we
found that student-invented statistics included clear coor-
dination between quantity and variability. In each, the
inventors clarified the scale of measure, invoking in both
reviews an imagined distribution of values corresponding
to zero variability, and contrasted this value to both
empirical and imagined distributions with much greater
variability and correspondingly greater measured quanti-
ties. These initial orientations toward measure suggest
student appropriation of the measurement ‘‘game.’’ As
further evidence of appropriation by students of the need to
engage the problematic of measure, the very quality of
valid measure established by the presenter in each case was
employed to undermine it by other members of the class.
The primary vehicle for doing so was to imagine other
plausible transformations of the empirical data, so that
reflections about the viability and generalization of the
measure were carried out primarily in imagined, not
empirical realms. The resulting exchanges often corre-
sponded to important issues in professional practice, such
as tensions between accounting for all data and trimming
unruly data. Hence, although the nature of student inter-
actions varied in each case, the activity structure of the
measure review provided a public space where students
made visible the grounds of argument for a measure’s
validity and where students suggested possible worlds
where these grounds might prove insufficient. The latter is
critical to mathematical generalization.
4.2 The teacher’s role in promoting disciplinary values
and practices
During the process of initial design, the teacher invoked the
need for communicative clarity and reproducibility to help
the student initiate a transformation from graphical region
to quantity. The teacher also stood in for the disciplinary
value of generalization, although in this, the student
inventor was his willing accomplice (it was she who
Developing conceptions of statistics by designing measures of distribution
mentioned to the teacher the need to think about what would
happen if the process were repeated). During the measure
reviews, the teacher promoted a focus on relations between
a statistic and the characteristic of the distribution being
measured by that statistic. Some of the teacher moves were
generic, such as staging the discussion by providing a
projection of two distributions simultaneously. This staging
meant that students had a common object to view and
transform as needed. But other teacher moves were less
generic. For example, the teacher often assisted student
exploration of the viability of particular statistic-distribu-
tion relations by creating paradoxes, such as the exchange
during the measure review of the range statistic. In this
exchange, student perception of the density of case values in
the display suggested one conclusion about the comparative
variability of the two sample distributions, but the value of
the statistic demanded a different conclusion. The paradox
between seeing and measuring helped students understand
the contingencies of a particular measure and communi-
cated more general lessons about the epistemic nature of
measure. In both cases, the teacher also ratified disciplinary
values such as the extreme case heuristic and the generation
of possible, rather than sole reliance on empirical, scenarios
for considering the validity of a measure.
In closing, we suggest that involving students in the
design of measures is a practical pedagogy by which
understanding of phenomena and of measure co-originate.
As students invent measures, they encounter and attempt to
resolve the often problematic and occasionally contentious
relation between phenomena and measure. Initial measures
can be fruitfully expanded and refined by participation in
activity structures such as measure reviews, where different
perspectives about the same measure provide rich oppor-
tunities for productive conceptual expansions of the
meaning of a measure and of the characteristics of the
phenomenon indicated by that measure. Teachers play a
vital role in supporting students’ reach for complex notions,
such as statistic and variability, so that their reach comes to
exceed their initial grasp. Such experience and associated
mathematical aesthetic may prove to be of enduring value
as students participate in ever widening circles of civic
discourses that are governed by measures and models.
Acknowledgments The research reported here was supported by
the U.S. National Science Foundation, REC-0337675 and by the
Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education,
through Grant R305K060091 to Vanderbilt University.
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