The meaning of randomness for secondary school students

In the experimental study reported here we intended to examine possible differences in secondary students' conceptions about randomness before and after instruction in probability, which occurs for the Spanish students between the ages of 14 and 17. To achieve this aim, we gave 277 secondary students a written questionnaire with some items taken from Green (1989, 1991). with our results we extend Green's previous research to 17-year-old students and complement his results with the analysis of students' arguments to support randomness in bidimensional distributions. Our results also indicate that students' subjective understanding of randomness is close to some interpretations of randomness throughout history.