This research focuses on fourth-grade (9-year-old) students' informal and intuitive<br>conceptions of probability and distribution revealed as they worked through a sequence of tasks. These<br>tasks were designed to study students' spontaneous reasoning about distributions in different settings and<br>their understanding of probability of various binomial random events that they explored with a set of<br>physical chance mechanisms. The data were gathered from a pilot study with four students. We analyzed<br>the interplay of reasoning about distribution and understanding of probability. The findings suggest that<br>students' qualitative descriptions of distributions could be developed into the quantification of probabilities<br>through reasoning about data in chance situations.
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