Abstract

Citizens today are immersed in a very complex and technological world, which requires them to analyse and discuss alternatives, as well as to argue and make decisions. Educating students as citizens requires familiarising them with statistics and giving them educational opportunities so they can make decisions based on data. In order for students to be able to understand key statistics concepts better and to begin to develop statistical thinking, early development of the capabilities of exploring and learning from data is beneficial. This chapter shows that by strengthening teachers’ reflections in Lesson Study Groups, teachers innovate in the classroom and, for example in grade K (5 years old) and grade 2 (7 years old), they are then able to get pupils involved in resolving exploratory data analysis situations. The chapter goes on to present diverse data representations produced by pupils, details some components – statistical, numerical, and geometric – of the different representations, and identifies some transnumeration techniques used by students to understand the behaviour of the data. Our findings, which are based on the consideration that external representations are cognitive tools that give meaning to discovering, communicating, and reasoning with data account for the early understanding of fundamental statistical concepts, the richness of the graph and table meta-representations created by the pupils, and the data sense making they develop.