To Örebro University

Students’ peer collaboration efforts in mathematics and statistics is a topic that has increasingly gained attention in research. In any collaboration, authority relations play a role for how meaning is constituted: Whenever things are discussed and decision sare made, authority is involved in a sense that some arguments or persons may be more convincing and powerful than others. In this article, we investigate how authority changes dynamically in type and in distribution as groups of fifth grade students collaborate in data generation processes. We identify and categorize authority using an epistemological framework, which is based on the philosophical theory of inferentialism. The results show that the three different types of authority described in inferentialism are all identifiable in students’ collaborative work. We also find and categorize further types of authority connected to the statistics group work, some of which are hardly addressed in previous research.

Data generation in statistics education is often conducted by the students them-selves; however, the question of what learning opportunities the data generation process offers has only been studied to a small extent. This paper investigates to what extent data generation is an observational and procedural vs. a conceptual activity. We inquire into this question based on an empirical study where eleven year old students measured the jump lengths of paper frogs. Our analysis draws on stu-dents’ discussions in group work, and it uses inferentialism as a background theory. Our results indicate that students’ discussions are conceptual to a certain extent and provide various learning opportunities for the students.