An Investigation Into High School Students' Understanding Of Random Events And Their Probabilities

As the introduction of probability and statistics to the mathematics course for Primary and Secondary School students, it's urgent to study them, especially for the students who don't contact with the knowledge of probability until they get into senior high school. How they know about the probability is much worthy to research, because these students are subjected to the tie of the logical deduction much longer. Only by recognizing how students know about them, then we can carry out teaching availably.The paper mainly contains three parts. The first part includes the first chapter and the second chapter. In this part, the author illustrates the purpose of writing this paper, related internal and international study and investigating methods adopted in this paper.The second part has chapter iii, chapter iv, chapter v , they introduced the outcome of the survey for three problems respectively. Three problems are how the high school students understand the random events, whether they make use of probability information to handle random events and how the students comprehend the concept of probability. Chapter iii studies the first problem in two aspects, one is the understanding of the possibility of random events; the other is the understanding of "the law of great numbers" which means that the events express a regulation in great quantities of repeated experiments. The results indicate that the students are incline to know random events by probability value, while some students think the chance of events' occurrence is inscrutability and quantified. And it's difficult for them to comprehend "the law of great numbers", but their probability background by teaching could help them know it.Chapter iv studies the students to make use of probability information to handle random events in two aspects, one is making use of the indirect probability information, and the other is making use of the probability value. The results show that the background of the topics may effect on the withdrawing of the probability information contained, and the change of the probability value may also influence their judgment of the random events.Chapter v goes on with the research on comprehending the concept of probability from three angles: in subjective, in theory and in experimental. The results show that they all have better understanding in classical and geometrical probability, but geometrical probability seem to be more difficult, students haven't learned probability have many mistakes in the subjective understanding and the students don't accept mostly to estimate probability value by worthing with the frequency values.The last part sums up this paper, which introduces the main conclusions, suggestions for teaching, continuous study thesis.