What is Inferential Statistics

The teaching of statistics at university to non-majors is an under-research area of statistics education. This chapter investigates what characterizes the context of teaching statistics at tertiary level. To do this, the chapter takes an activity theory perspective to situate the teaching of statistics within the activity of learning. The data consists of observations of statistics lectures from one statistics for Psychologists module and interviews with the lecturer. The data was analyzed using activity theory as an analytical tool and theoretical perspective. As expected, context in this statistical module was about the scenario or story relating to a dataset used in problems, exercises or examples. In addition, the lecturer moved between multiple (or parallel) contexts with different, possibly conflicting rules, tools and communities. The findings add to the work on understanding context in learning statistics and provide insights into its complexity and multi-faceted nature.