Despite all the criticisms that we could offer of the traditional introductory statistics course, it at least has a clear objective: to teach ideas central to statistical 1 This article originally appeared as “Data Analysis as the Search for Signals in Noisy Processes,” in the Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, 33 (4), 259–289,copyright 2002, and is reproduced here with the permission of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. All rights reserved. The writing of this article was supported by National Science Foundation (NSF) grants REC-9725228 and ESI-9818946. Opinions expressed are those of the authors and not necessarily those of NSF.