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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Jul 1, 2026

Problem-Solving Before Instruction (PS-I): A Protocol for Assessment and Intervention in Students with Different Abilities

Problem-Solving Before Instruction (PS-I): A Protocol for Assessment and Intervention in Students with Different Abilities

Published on: September 11, 2021

Experience and problem representation in statistics.

Mitchell Rabinowitz¹, Tracy M Hogan

¹Fordham University, Graduate School of Education, New York, NY 10023, USA. mrabinowitz@fordham.edu

The American Journal of Psychology

|September 17, 2008

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

Statistics students' problem representation depends on experience. Novices focus on surface details, while experienced students consider deeper structural features, impacting how they solve statistical problems.

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Area of Science:

Statistics Education
Cognitive Psychology

Background:

Problem representation is crucial for statistical reasoning.
Understanding how experience influences this representation is key to improving statistics education.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate how varying levels of statistics experience affect students' problem representation strategies.
To determine whether students prioritize surface-level or structural features when solving statistical problems.

Main Methods:

A triad judgment task was employed, presenting students with a target problem and two source problems.
Source problems shared either surface narrative similarities or structural statistical similarities (t-test, correlation, chi-square) with the target problem.
Graduate students with diverse statistics course backgrounds participated.

Main Results:

Students with 0-4 statistics courses predominantly used surface-level features for problem representation.
Students with over 4 courses showed less consistent reliance on either surface or structural features.
All students recognized structural features when surface-level competition was removed.

Conclusions:

Statistics course experience significantly influences the basis of problem representation.
Instructional design should consider novice reliance on surface features and foster deeper structural understanding in advanced learners.
Explicitly highlighting structural similarities can enhance problem representation across experience levels.