Responding to world wide recommendations that recognize the importance of having younger students develop a greater understanding of probability, this study designed and evaluated a third-grade instructional program in probability. The instructional program was informed by a cognitive framework that describes students' probabilistic thinking and also adopted a socio-constructivist orientation. Two classes participated in the instructional program, one in the fall (early) and the other in the spring (delayed). Following instruction, both groups displayed significant growth in probabilistic thinking that was not simply due to maturation. There was also evidence, based on four target students, that children's readiness to list the outcomes of the sample space, their ability to connect sample space and probability, and their predisposition to use valid number representations in describing probabilities, were key factors in fostering learning.
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