This paper discusses the premise that young children do not perceive accurate relationships between the behavior of different, but related random generators. Data for this preliminary study has been collected from suburban primary school students aged from 7 - 12 years, who were questioned about their perceptions of the behavior of dice, coins, raffle tickets and a range of different and unusual random generators in identical situations. The findings indicate that children predict different result depending for example, on whether tickets rather than dice are used in a game. Their predictions appears to be based on the observation of the physical differences between dice and raffle tickets. Owing to the size of the preliminary study no tests of significance have been carried out and results are given in simple percentages.
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