Coordinating between histograms and box plots

Abstract

Representational fluency consists of several aspects, like the efficiency with which one uses a particular representation and the efficiency with which one is able to coordinate between different representations. In this study we focused on this last element, more specifically on coordinating between histograms and box plots. Participants were 167 first year university students. They were asked to match box plots and histograms of the same distributions and to explain their matches. We found that students had one major difficulty when interpreting box plots: They tended to interpret the area of box plots incorrectly by assuming that a larger area represented more observations than a smaller area. In both items this led to incorrect matches and to incorrect explanations of these matches. Furthermore, students displayed several other misinterpretations.