Normalising: Children's activity to construct meanings for trend

This paper looks back over a number of exploratory studies which have researched young children's construction of meanings for graphs, produced from data entered in spreadsheets. In this paper we discuss children's use of normalising, an activity in which children correct data towards some perceived norm. Through normalising, children construct meanings for trend in data and in graphs. We discuss how particular aspects of the pedagogical setting including task design encourage the use of normalising.This revised version was published online in October 2005 with corrections to the Cover Date.