What is the Nature of High School Students' Conceptions and Misconceptions About Probability?

Abstract

This chapter will review research that focuses specifically on the probabilistic thinking of secondary school students (14-18 years) and relates it to the curriculum expectations outlined earlier in this introduction. In particulat, we will look at research assosciated with some key elements for the probability curriculum: combinatorial reasoning and problem solving, randomness, probability misconceptions, conditional probability and independence, association and contigency tables, random variables and probability distributions,sampling and inference, and simulation. We will also consider the implication of this research for teaching probability in the secondary school.