How students in statistics classes process mathematics.

The focus of this study was students' thought processes underlying their responses to questions on a statistics exam.  Two innovative measurement procedures were used to study the underlying processes: 

• Differences between the student and instructor perceived topics measured by the questions
• Students' conceptual distances of the topics used to construct the exam

By calculating various statistics of the student-teacher differences (including the Euclidean distance and a map of students' conceptual distances), the collected data and the correctness of students' actual answers on the exam can be useful to instructors and math coordinators/chairpersons for evaluating performance on a unit of study.