Literature Index

The research of psychologists, in particular from Kahneman and Tversky, has shown that in many situations of everyday life, people estimate the probability of random events using certain heuristics, specially representativeness. Much of the subsequent research in this area supports their thesis. Nevertheless, most of this work has used verbal problems as the means of studying people's conceptions and thinking, whether in a questionnaire or in an interview. In this work we present the results of a study of the pupils' use of representativeness in a situation of simulation of one of the classical problems related to the subject. The experience consisted of an individual interview with the students while simulating this situation and graphically representing the results, in order to answer some predetermined questions posed by the researcher. The analysis of student's pattern of responses before and after the realization of the simulation shows a wide variety of conceptions and the influence of the result of this simulation on the initial arguments of the pupils. As a result of this we conclude the didactical possibilities of simulation both as a means of exploring pupil's probabilistic intuitions and as an educational tool to overcome some of the misconceptions concerning these intuitions.

During the past decade, national and international organisations have been steadily increasing the number of web-based statistical databases available to general public. While often user-unfriendly (mostly due to poor design and organisation as well as lack of navigation options) in their pioneer years, many of these databases have been gradually transformed into well-managed expansive resources that can greatly enhance the teaching and learning of statistics. A number of illustrative examples are presented in this paper along with discussion of our experiences and identification of future challenges pertaining to their use in statistics courses.

This article presents some data from a major sports event that can be used in common statistical analyses.

Four experiments tested how well students in a college algebra class could use the solution of a distance, mixture, or work problem to solve other problems in the same category. The solution could either be applied directly to solve equivalent problems or had to be slightly modified to solve similar problems. Students in Experiment 1 could not use the solution to produce more correct solutions on either equivalent or similar problems. Experiments 2 and 3 demonstrated that either allowing students to consult the solution as they worked on the test problems or providing more elaborate solutions improved transfer to equivalent problems but did not improve transfer to similar problems. In Experiment 4 there was some transfer to similar problems that differed in complexity, but students relied too much on a syntactic approach in which they filled in the "slots" of an equation.