Basic modelling of uncertainty: young students’ mental models

摘要

This paper focuses on a research programme that aims to explore students’ mental models when acting within elementary situations of uncertainty before stochastics have been addressed in school. In order to frame our research, we begin by reporting briefly on the recent history of research in stochastics education. Then, we discuss the main aspects of our theoretical foundation concerning the research programme. Afterwards we restrict our discussion to an exploratory study aiming to further develop our theoretical framework, describing the development of tasks representing situations of uncertainty and the method of the exploratory study involving students of grade 4 and grade 6. Finally, from the perspective of theory development, we discuss the results of analysing students’ solutions gained through quantitative analysis of tests and qualitative analysis of written rationales and of interviews. We conclude our paper with a discussion of our research results and potential future research questions.