Games are often used in teaching as a means of introducing and exploring probability concepts, since they provide familiar and practical instances of the notions in question. This paper describes a study in which two versions of a game are used as the setting in which students' understanding of probability is assessed. The subjects involved had received no formal instruction in probability prior to the experiment, but during it some of them used intuitions about chance as they developed their strategies for playing. There is also evidence that as they responded to the interviewer's questions and explained their strategies, subjects sometimes attended to previously unnoticed features of the situations and developed new strategies as a result.
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