Piaget's viewpoint on the teaching of probability: A breaking-off with the historical notion of chance?


Book: 
Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference On Teaching Statistics (ICOTS-7), Salvador, Brazil.
Authors: 
San Martin, E.
Editors: 
Rossman, A., & Chance, B.
Category: 
Year: 
2006
Publisher: 
Voorburg, The Netherlands: International Statistical Institute.
URL: 
http://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/~iase/publications/17/8D1_SANM.pdf
Abstract: 

Piaget's constructivism and its further developments are used as the conceptual framework to relate, in the learning process, students' age with specific topics in probability and statistics. Such a perspective consists of opposing the notion of chance to that of a reversible sequence and, therefore, to causality. Nevertheless, when the contributions to probability theory developed during the 17th to the 19th centuries are considered, it can be noticed that the concept of chance is a characterization of "our ignorance of the causal chain." This fact motivates two questions which are discussed in this manuscript. The first one consists of understanding what constitutes the breaking-off between Cournot's viewpoint of probability and the traditional one. The second question consists of exploring what kind of probability and statistics teaching would be developed if the traditional viewpoint on chance and probability is considered.

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