Honors the contribution of Efraim Fischbein to the study and analysis of probabilistic thinking. Summarizes Fischbein's early work, then focuses on the role of intuition in mathematical and scientific thinking; the development of probabilistic thinking; and the influence of instruction on that development. (Author/MM)

Discusses students' preconceptions of randomness and offers an alternative way to think about the concept using the idea of complexity. That is, the randomness of a sequence can be measured by the difficulty of encoding it. Methods of judging complexity and implications for teaching are discussed. (Contains 30 references.) (MKR)

Presents four probability problems, their simulations, and analyses. The first illustrates a discrete situation for which it is possible to list the sample space. The second and third are continuous--the number of possible outcomes is infinite. The last is discrete with a surprising continuous extension question which leads to l/e. (JN)