Conceptual understanding is not enough! Supporting students to see statistics as epistemic tools.

Variability is everywhere! The answers to so many questions we ask about the world change all around us, so how can we say anything amidst all the changes? Unfortunately, in schools statistics are often treated like a set of procedures to apply to data. Blagh… However, it is possible to engage students with these ideas in a way that helps them struggle with the ubiquitous challenge of variability. In this session I will frame statistical work as modeling variability, discuss different kinds of variability and their implications for learning, and provide examples of how students can engage with variability, invent methods for describing variability, and in the process learn about how statistics tell us things about the world we would not know without them.