Research On Grade Ten Students’ Level Of Cognitive Development Of Probability

Probability is a branch of mathematics, which plays an important role in thecultivation of students’ mathematics literacy and in everyday life, so the teaching ofprobability has become a key content in primary and middle school. Thus, educationalresearchers should pay attention to students’ cognitive level of probability and difficultiesstudents come across in their learning.This study evaluates the quality of students’ learning from four aspects which aresample space, probability of an event, probability comparison and conditional probabilityand independence, then the writer use the SOLO taxonomy to define which probabilisticrecognition level have students attained.The results suggest that the overall performance of the students is well, the proportionof R level and E level are close to60%, but the answers of R level are twice as many as Elevel. On the other side, answers at M level are20%, answers at U level and P level areabout21%, which suggests the level of the students’ thinking has to be improved. Moststudents could use some methods such as tree and ordered array to list sample space of arandom event correctly. Students have difficulties in using probability formula to calculatethe probability of an event. The main errors the students made are producing an inadequatetree diagram, misusing probability formula, and cannot distinguish replacement andwithout replacement.