How Faithful Is Old Faithful? Statistical Thinking: A Story of Variation and Prediction

Abstract

Statistics is a relatively new discipline. Only in the last one hundred years have common methods and common reasoning evolved that can be applied to data from many fields. In the early years, the field of statistics was influenced by the work of Ronald A. Fisher, Karl Pearson, and Jerz Neyman. They focused on developing tools and methods that primarily focused on randomization More recently, exploratory data analysis has been emphasized (Tukey 1977). As statistics continues to mature as a discipline, statistics educators are paying more attention to developing overall models of statistical thinking (Wild and Pfannkuch 1999). This shift in statistics means refocusing the emphasis in teaching from how to do statistics to how to think about statistics.