Analyses On Common Mistakes Of Middle School Students' Probability Studying

Probability and Mathematical Statistics came to China at 20th Century, but, Statisticseducation in our Mathematics education history went ups and downs. Finally, it wasintroduced into primary and middle school's classrooms at 21st Century. Because lack ofdeveloping time, the research on this subject's education fell behind teaching, students stillhave problems on receiving statistics knowledge. This research is based on the DevelopmentMethods from Netherlands Freudenthal Institute, its target is to know what wrong conceptsthe students will have when studying Statistics as well as the causes of these wrongconcepts.After reading a large amount of articles, and taking Teacher Li Jun's research asreference, an investigation was made to know the situation of northern students studystatistics. A research was made especially on grade 2 middle school students who havealready some basic probability knowledge. Main methods are questionnaires andface-to-face inquires. In research, 25 questions concerning probability are arranged into twoparallel papers and these papers are distributed to about 450 students in three schools fortesting, among which, 22 students are chosen for face-to-face inquiry. Test results areanalyzed by statistic method, in order to show the understanding condition of Grade 2 highschool students by numbers. In the mean time, a research is made to analyze theunderstanding condition of students from different style schools, in order to know thedifferent school style influence on students' study. Later, face-to-face inquiry is made onsingle student, in order to know students' thinking process when dealing with probabilityproblems, so, from where or from when do the incorrect understanding of probability occurcan be found and in the end the root can be analyzed.After this research, three main wrong concepts are found, among which, the commonone is student always use simple compound method and non-mathematic methods to solvethe problems, also, no matter high-level middle schools or common middle schools, thepercentage of students who have the above mentioned problems is not low.Although the results of this research has its limitation, but still hope it is helpful forpresent middle schools' probability teaching.