Introduction

The last two decades have seen increasing interest within the mathematics community in reforming the undergraduate curriculum. Efforts at reform have embraced a wide range of issues, including teaching methods, content, assessment, and administration. Among the several mathematical disciplines receiving close scrutiny under the lens of reform, statistics—especially at the introductory level—has received much attention, focused particularly on pedagogy, technology, and the content of introductory courses. Recommended changes in content include an increased emphasis on data production and analysis, with less time given to “recipes and derivations” [5]. Some statisticians also suggest treating data ethics and introducing students to the nature of official statistics and the organization of national statistics offices. This shift in emphasis marks a significant departure from traditional approaches to the subject, even at the introductory level. As one spokesman for reform efforts in statistics has put it, “What we want beginners to learn about statistics has changed dramatically in the past generation” [23, p. 126].

Statisticians have reached a fairly high level of agreement about the appropriate content and emphases in introductory statistics courses [23]. Others who teach the subject, however (mathematicians, sociologists, economists, for example) aren't always familiar with the recommendations of the statistics community, or in agreement with them. One set of recommendations focuses on the place of probability in elementary courses. Recognizing that additions to the list of topics in a course nearly always require some deletions, many reformers argue for a diminished role for probability theory [5, 23], pointing out that “only an informal grasp of probability is needed to follow the reasoning of standard statistical inference” [23, p. 128].