Understanding Students' Beliefs About Probability

Although I don't want here to defend my point of view, it will serve my purposes to exemplify what I regard as a contrary one. My assumption is that students have intuitions about probability and that they can't check these in at the classroom door. The success of the teacher depends on large part on how these notions are treated in relation of those the teacher would like the student to acquire. Additionally, I think it is a myth that mathematics, either as a discipline or in the mind of a mathematician, develops independently from concerns about objects and relations that are believed to have real-world referents. This was certainly not so in the case of the development of probability theory.