Prospective primary school teachers' perception of randomness

Carmen Batanero

Pedro Arteaga

Luis Serrano

Blanca Ruiz

pp. 345-366

in: Egan J. Chernoff, Bharath Sriraman (eds), Probabilistic thinking, Berlin, Springer, 2014

Abstract

Subjective perception of randomness has been researched by psychologists and mathematics educators, using a variety of tasks, resulting in a number of different descriptions for the biases that characterize people's performances. Analysing prospective teachers' possible biases concerning randomness is highly relevant as new mathematics curricula for compulsory teaching levels are being proposed that incorporate increased study of random phenomena. In this chapter, we present results of assessing perception of randomness in a sample of 208 prospective primary school teachers in Spain. We first compare three pairs of random variables deduced from a classical task in perception of randomness and deduce the mathematical properties these prospective teachers assign to sequences of random experiments. Then, the written reports, where prospective teachers analyse the same variables and explicitly conclude about their own intuitions are also studied. Results show a good perception of the expected value and poor conception of both independence and variation as well as some views of randomness that parallel some naïve conceptions on randomness held at different historic periods.