Literature Index

If it is accepted that the concepts of probability are complicated, it should be also accepted that they are very near to the daily life of common people. Anyway, everybody has to face a variety of situations of uncertainty that can cause either anxiety or joy. As the idea is to teach these concepts to the students, the best way to do it is to have fun when carrying it out. This paper reports the experience with a group of students who are preparing to become high school teachers, in the world of probability by talking about soccer. With this sport as a reference a question is posed such that when students are asked about it, it not only allows an interesting probabilistic analysis, but also takes them, when solving it, to other mathematics concepts like limits and derivatives. The whole situation is presented: its position as conjecture, attempts of answering that include computer work and graphics up to its formal proof.

This paper identifies and discusses misconceptions that students have in making judgments of center and variability when data are presented graphically. An assessment addressing interpreting center and variability in histograms and stem-and-leaf plots was administered to, and follow-up interviews were conducted with, undergraduates enrolled in introductory statistics courses. Assessment items focused upon comparing the variability of two data sets of common range represented by bell-shaped histograms on a common scale, computing measures of center from data extracted from graphs, and in comparing the relative location of the mean and median on a histogram from skewed data. Students' misconceptions often stemmed from their difficulty in maintaining understanding of the data that are being represented graphically.

This article reports on a subset of a larger study that addresses students' probabilistic thinking; the focus here is on students' thinking to three tasks involving coins. As well there are also highlights of the associated interview dialogues between the teacher-researcher and the students.

From the statistical education point of view, each discipline teacher needs to fond that discipline's relationship to statistics before statistics can provide a meeting ground, a common "language", with other disciplines. A basic idea of its principles and a certain baseline awareness and appreciation of its possibilities (with respect to "my" discipline) are needed fist of all. Statistics Prize entries show that this kind of cross-curriculum project is usually better handled in primary schools. There, the teachers are general in their orientation, so they already have an elective view of research activities. At secondary level, however, this perspective has often disappeared and has to be encouraged in the teachers first before their students will get a taste of real cross-curricular work.