The child's intuition of probability

The main aim of our research has been to contribute to an elucidation of the following problem: from what age, and in what sense, is it possible to speak of an intuition of chance and probability in the child? Taking Piaget's view as our starting-point, we have assumed that the central feature is that of the relationship between the possible and the necessary. At the same time, we have looked at other aspects which seemed likely to throw light on the problem as a whole: (a) Probability can be expressed either as a prediction of a single isolated event (without specifying the hypothetical multiplicity of its origin), of as a prediction of several events - which may be repetitions of a single event, or a succession of different events. We therefore need to know to what extent children of different ages understand the concept of relative frequency, and the extent to which this enters into their understanding of probabilistic situations. (b) How far is the child able to abstract a common probabilistic structure from different specific contexts and situations? It seemed important to us to include series of events described by unequal probabilities. Reprinted from Enfance 2 (1967), 193 - 206.