Some things children learn in school seem to them predetermined and rule bound. In studying data and statistics, they can also learn that solutions to some problems depend on assumptions and have some degree of uncertainty. The kind of reasoning used in probability and statistics is not always intuitive, and so students will not necessarily develop it if it is not included in the curriculum. Such questions often offer opportunities for beginning the study of data analysis and probability. As students move to higher grades, the questions they generate for investigation can be based on current issues and interests.
Young children can devise simple data-gathering plans to attempt to answer their questions.
In the primary grades, the teacher might help frame the question or provide a tally sheet, class roster, or chart on which data can be recorded as they are collected. As students move through the elementary grades, they should spend more time planning the data collection and evaluating how well their methods worked in getting information about their questions. In the middle grades, students should work more with data that have been gathered by others or generated by simulations. They should learn what different numbers, symbols, and points mean. Recognizing that some numbers represent the values of the data and others represent the frequency with which those values occur is a big step.