The effect of verbal and illustrative representation on solving statistical problems by students in elementary school

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of verbal and illustrative representation of the same statistical problems experienced by 56 elementary school students. Students were evaluated on problem-solving skills through six statistical problems as presented in school textbooks. One week later, the students were re-evaluated on problem-solving skills using the same problems that had been illustratively and verbally represented by the researchers. At the same time, we examined the correlation of students' performance to the six given problems in relation to their reading comprehension, verbal and mathematical competence (based on teachers' grade assignment). From the results of the quantitative research method that was used, there was a statistically significant correlation between the verbal representations in a) two out of six problems related to the mean value calculation using α representational table format and b) a bar graph construction based on a representational table format. However, an important finding of the research was the high correlation between students' performance and their reading comprehension, verbal and mathematical competence.
 Keywords: Verbal representation of a problem, illustrative representation of a problem, statistics.