Scientific Reasoning Research Institute

TinkerPlots was a research and development project aimed at creating a new type of data analysis software tool for instructional use in data analysis and statistics in middle schools. The software offers a construction set rather than a menu of ready-made graph types, and helps orient students and teachers to the inquiry-driven nature of data analysis. The development of Tinker Plots was done in collaboration with teams that developed comprehensive instructional materials for middle school mathematics. Revisions of some units of these instructional materials were done in order to support the classroom testing of the software.

The completed software package, named TinkerPlots, is commercially available from Key Curriculum Press.

This project was supported in part by a grant from the National Science Foundation (DRL-9818946). Opinions expressed here are those of the project staff and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Foundation.