Children's understanding of probability: an intervention study

This project will examine the most effective ways to teach children about probability. This is an important concept in education and daily life but can be difficult for both children and adults to understand. It follows two previous Nuffield-funded reviews by the same researchers, ‘Key Understandings in Mathematics Learning’, and an initial review of research on children’s understanding of probability (due to be published in spring 2012).

Learning about probability makes four kinds of demand on children’s cognitive skills:

1. To understand the nature of randomness.
2. To be able to work out all the possible events in the context of the problem.
3. To reason proportionally in order to calculate the probability of particular events.
4. To understand correlations, which are crucial for understanding risk.

Psychological research has provided evidence about how children can learn and can be taught to satisfy each of these demands. This project will assess the effectiveness of applying this evidence to the teaching of probability to nine- and ten-year-old children.