This book is published to coincide with the Fourth International Conference on Teaching Statistics held in Marrakech, Morocco, 1994. There is a growing interest in Data Handling (or Statistics) worldwide and I hope that this book can assist those who have the exciting task of promoting this activity in school and college curricula.
The present book presents a translation of the Hebrew text, Thinking Under Uncertainty, rewritten to include material more suited to American adults than to Israeli school children. However, the elementary approach used in the original is retained here. Although the topic of uncertainty is an advanced topic within mathematics, this book should be accessible to any adult with a minimal knowledge of arithmetic, that is, addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and the calculation of percentages.
This book contains a pool of several different articles written by individuals committed to expanding the teaching of statistics and probability in the schools.
The ASA Section on Statistical Education has been a forum for the exchange of attitudes and ideas about statistics teaching at all levels.
The author seeks to bridge the longstanding gap between behavioral and cognitive perspectives on choice. Acknowledging the existence and the relevance of internal judgments and decisions in the external choices we make, he shows not only how these cognitive processes can be understood in behavioral terms but also how cognitive and behavioral views can be reconciled.
The present book focuses on the intersection between two recent lines of thought. Both have been called "revolutions." The term "cognitive revolution" signifies the transition from understanding humans in terms of overt behavior to understanding them in terms of mental structures and processes. The term "probabilistic revolution" describes the transition from a deterministic understanding of science, in which uncertainty and variability were not permitted, to an understanding of science where probabilistic ideas became indispensable in theorizing. From the intersection of the inference revolution and the rising cognitive revolution a new understanding of the mind emerged: The mind as an "intuitive statistician." It is this second revolution on which the book focuses: It treats the new view of cognitive processes as statistical inference and hypotheses testing. But claim that the success of the second revolution relies heavily on that of the first and that the new methods of inferences have been transplanted to serve as explanations for how many cognitive processes work., and this has brought to cognitive psychology both a unifying perspective and, also certain blind spots inherent in these institutionalized statistical tools.