This study investigates levels of thinking of elementary and middle school students doing their tasks of explaining and dealing with variability. According to results, on the task of explaining variability in the measurement settings five levels of thinking were identified: a lack of understanding of explanation of the causes, an insufficient understanding of the causes, an offer of physical causes, consideration of unexplained causes as the source of variability, and consideration of unexplained causes as quasi-chance variability. Also, in the chance settings five levels of thinking were identified: a lack of understanding of explanation of the causes, an insufficient understanding of the causes, an offer of physical causes, recognition of chance variability, and consideration of causes of distribution. On the task of dealing with variability in both the measurement and chance settings five levels of thinking were identified: a lack of understanding of dealing with variability, no physical control and improper statistical control, no physical control and proper statistical control, physical control and improper statistical control, and physical control and proper statistical control.