Students' intuitions on randomness

Abstract

Probability and statistics have been recognized as essential parts of the math curriculum for all students. A serious source of difficulty in learning statistics is the incorrect intuitive beliefs that students have about statistical phenomena. Students 'intuitions about the statistical concept of randomness was the focus of this study. Intuitive beliefs of 46 junior high and high school students were measured through administration of a pretest and interviews. After a general teaching unit from the Quantitative Literacy series Exploring Probability, intuitions were once again measured through a posttest and interviews to see if incorrect intuitions were correctly altered or adjusted. Most of the students-'intuitions on the pretest were consistent with results found in the literature--they used the representativeness heuristic, the law-of-small numbers, and a visual process to identify randomness. The posttest analyses showed that students were able to overcome using the representativeness heuristic and a visual process when judging a sequence to be random. Therefore, the treatment did correctly alter a significant number of students' intuitive beliefs about randomness.