When a Six Does Not Appear: Prospective Primary Teachers’ Questions for Informal Statistical Inference

Teachers’ questions shape how students use data, representations, and uncertainty, yet little is known about the inferential opportunities embedded in questions formulated by prospective primary teachers using a provided representation. This study analyzed 133 questions produced by 45 prospective primary teachers for sixth-grade students in a semi-structured problem-posing task based on a dotplot of 60 die rolls in which no six appeared and two contrasting interpretations. Using theory-informed content analysis, we found that, under the scaffolded task conditions, most questions combined generalization beyond the observed data, data as evidence, and probabilistic language. Explicit comparison of the two interpretations was uncommon in the wording of individual questions, while future or unobserved outcomes and the data-generating process were more frequent foci. Retrospective assessments and analytical classifications provided related but not fully equivalent perspectives on the formulated questions. The findings distinguish the inferential opportunities afforded by a task from the inferential demands explicitly encoded in individual question wording and show how these demands were expressed under explicit pedagogical constraints.