Coordination of theoretical probability and relative frequency estimates is challenging in probability teaching and learning. Modeling is one of the ways of teaching and learning that facilitates inquiry between these two perspectives. Given that, we designed a modeling activity to support fifteen secondary students in investigating theoretical…

Findings on children's proportional reasoning abilities strongly vary across studies. This might be due to the different contexts that can be used in proportional problems: fair-sharing, mixtures, and probability. A review of the scientific literature suggests that the context of proportional problems may not only impact the difficulty of the…

The multi-faceted nature of mathematics knowledge for teaching, including pedagogical content knowledge (PCK), has been studied widely in elementary classrooms, but little research has focused on senior secondary mathematics teaching. This study utilised the Knowledge Quartet (Rowland et al., "Research in Mathematics Education," 17(2),…

Past studies have documented some pre-service teachers' (PSTs) difficulties in reasoning about sampling variability. This study adds to the body of literature by investigating the ideas that PSTs employ in reasoning about sampling variability, and by conjecturing what is behind the difficulties especially during the contextuality episodes. This…

Comparing probabilities is a useful skill in life. Binary choice tasks are popular means in research on probabilistic reasoning. Falk, Yudilevich-Assouline, and Elstein ("Educational Studies in Mathematics," 81(2), 207-233 2012) noted that many of these tasks contain design flaws. We designed and evaluated an extended and improved binary…

Mathematical language (or the content-specific words in mathematics) has repeatedly shown to be related to mathematical abilities in preschool and in the early grades of primary education. Research in this field has predominantly focused on young children's quantitative and spatial language. At the same time, recent research has discovered that…

Problems teaching probability in Tonga (in the South Pacific) led to the question on how language and culture affect the understanding of probability and uncertainty. The research uses a discursive approach to identify the endorsed narratives which underlie Tongans' reasoning in situations of uncertainty. I aim to justify the claim that the Tongan…

The aim of this study is to explore Israeli high school graduates' mathematical explanations for the spread of the coronavirus, given that the mathematics required to do so was part of their school curriculum. An online questionnaire consisting of two sections provided a variety of potential framings for explaining the phenomenon. The first…

There is ample evidence that reasoning about stochastic phenomena is often subject to systematic bias even after instruction. Few studies have examined the detailed learning processes involved in learning probability. This paper examines a case study drawn from a large corpus of data collected as part of a research project that dealt with the…

This study reports the results of a study examining how easily students are able to transfer frequency solutions to conditional probability problems to novel situations. University students studied either a problem solved using the traditional Bayes formula format or using a natural frequency (tree diagram) format. In addition, the example problem…

Currently, instruction pays little attention to the development of students' sampling variability reasoning in relation to statistical inference. In this paper, we briefly discuss the especially designed sampling variability learning experiences students aged about 15 engaged in as part of a research project. We examine assessment and…

This article is a systematic reflection on a sequence of episodes related to teaching probability. Our central claim is that reducing problems to a consideration of the sample space, which consists of equiprobable outcomes, may not be in accord with learners' initial ways of reasoning. We suggest a "desirable pedagogical approach" in which the…

The purpose of this study is to contribute insights into how collaborative activity can help promote students' mathematical understanding. A group of six high school students (15- to 16-year olds) worked together on a challenging probability task as part of a larger, after-school, longitudinal study on students' development of mathematical ideas…

This paper (1) presents a conceptual framework for analyzing the mathematics addressed in probability lessons and (2) uses the framework to compare the mathematics that two teachers with contrasting teaching approaches addressed in class when teaching the topic of probability. One teaching approach aimed to develop understanding; the other…

We present a view of knowledge construction processes, focusing on partially correct constructs. Motivated by unexpected and seemingly inconsistent quantitative data based on the written reports of students working on an elementary probability task, we analyze in detail the knowledge construction processes of a representative student. We show how…