Abstract:

With the recent reforms in the school mathematics curriculum in Turkey “probability and statistics” has become one of the main strands of the primary and the secondary mathematics curricula, similar to the trend earlier in several other countries, such as the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. In this context, it becomes essential to help students develop key ideas in probability, such as the law of large numbers, theoretical and empirical probabilities, in the curriculum starting from the primary grades. Computer technologies are vital tools to develop these ideas as they provide learning environments involving explorations with large data sets and dynamic, visual representations (e.g., Pratt, 2000; Vahey, Enyedy, & Gifford, 2000; Iversen & Nilsson, 2007).

The aim of this paper is to describe some uses of modeling features of the data exploration software TinkerPlots (Konold & Miller, 2004) when exploring typical chance events and reasoning about probabilities. TinkerPlots, designed particularly for 4th through 8th grade students, is a dynamic data analysis tool with features to support the development of statistical thinking. The new version of the software (TinkerPlots 2.0) includes an integrated simulation component and modeling capabilities to help students learn probability and data modeling. Using the Sampler object students are able to build a model of prototypical chance events, such as rolling two dice. This modeling approach enables students to explore these chance events as well as to express and test their informal theories about probability (Konold & Kazak, 2008). To present these new features to support probabilistic thinking, the examples of seventh grade students’ modeling with TinkerPlots and their understanding of probability in various tasks during an after-school program will be described in the paper.

Keywords:

Probability, middle school students, TinkerPlots, simulation, modeling.