Construcción de significados sobre distribuciones muestrales y conceptos previos a la inferencia en un ambiente de simulación computacional

in the present paper we report results of a research about the meanings that a group of 11 university students constructed about sampling distributions and other concepts previous to the statistical inference in a computer simulation environment like the one provided by fathom, a software that has been developed for teaching statistics and probability. the study focused in identifying the different elements of meaning constructed by the students and their evolution as a result of the computer simulation environment. the main concepts considered in the study were the sampling variability, the effect of sample size on the behavior of the sampling distributions and the probabilities of samples results. sampling distributions of means and proportions were considered in the study.