The concepts of disjunctive events and independent events are didactic ideas that are daily used in the classroom. Previous observations of attitudes and assessment given to students at university level who attend the introductory Statistics course have helped detect the confusion between disjunctive events and independent events, and indicate the spontaneous ideas that students tend to elaborate about both concepts in the different situations in which these notions have to be considered. However the relation between these ideas and their formal definitions is not known in detail. In this work, we use Didactic Engineering as methodology to analyze students' misconceptions, their persistence, and the process by which the student confronts his misconceptions by applying theoretical concepts. The aim is to improve the teaching of these topics.
The CAUSE Research Group is supported in part by a member initiative grant from the American Statistical Association’s Section on Statistics and Data Science Education