How Big Is a Leaf? Using Cognitive Tuning to Explore a Teacher's Communication Processes to Elicit Children's Emerging Ideas about Data

The intangible concept of data, as part of statistical literacy, can be complex for young children to grasp. Inquiry as a pedagogy has potential for supporting student development of statistical literacy as the investigation process is driven by the inquiry question. The aim of this paper is to gain insight into how a teacher's communication processes with her students supported their emerging understandings about the abstract concept of data. In this exploratory case study, we present data from a Year 4 classroom (age 9) in a guided mathematical inquiry within the STEM context of agricultural science. The inquiry question the students addressed was, "How big is a leaf?" The inquiry focused on linking data to the real-life context the data represented.