This paper is from Session 8E: Research on developing students’ probabilistic reasoning

which comes under Topic 8: Research in statistics education

Reasoning development of a high school student about probability concept

Presenter

• Julio C Valdez (Center for Research and Advances Studies of IPN, Mexico)

Co-author

• Ernesto Sánchez (Cinvestav-IPN, Mexico)

Abstract

In this article the development of reasoning of a high-school student on the concept of probability is described from the inferences formulated as he solved three problems. An adaptation of Jones et al.’s (1999) framework was used to indicate the important characteristics in his reasoning. As a result, the difficulties faced by the student at different moments were: overcoming the law of small numbers, managing the variation in a convenient way, giving meaning to the quantification of the propensity of occurrence of an event, articulating the uncertainty of the individual outcomes with the long-run regularity of the relative frequencies, and using probability as a premise to formulate inferences. Three important elements to overcome these difficulties were: an informal knowledge of the law of large numbers, the reasoning with relative numbers and the partial institutionalization of the classical interpretation of probability when it was already informally used by the student.