EXPERIENCES OF APPLYING PROBABILITY THEORY IN PRIMARY SCHOOL

Аннотация

In recent years, many countries have tried to incorporate the probability concepts into the curriculum of primary school. The researchers disagree as to what the age of children dealing with probability contents should be. The aim of this study was to investigate the grade of understanding of the probability concepts in primary school students depending on their age and their gender. It has been concluded that the majority of students was able to recognize different events and categorize them depending on their likelihood. The major difference in their abilities was noticed between the children of the second grade and those of the third grade whereas it has been experienced that girls performed better in all the tasks and in all the grades except for the fourth grade in which boys present a slightly better score. Keywords: teaching probabilities, primary school, probability concepts, probability tasks Among the new development and trends in mathematics education internationally at primary level, is the introduction of probability. Nowadays, there is a need to work on the Probability Theory because we are obliged to make predictions and to take decisions under uncertain situations having to evaluate at the same time a big amount of information. Researchers from many countries (like Farnworth, 1991; Fischbein & Schnarch, 1997; Freudenthal, 1973; Gardner, https://scientific-jl.com/luch/ 4 4 8 Часть-44_ Том-2_ Май-2025 1989; Jones, 1995; Koshy, Ernest & Casey, 1999; Shaughnessy, 1992; Sobel & Maletsky, 1988), notice that probability is very important branch in mathematics education because: • it provides opportunities for students to engage in interesting and purposeful learning activities, • it is easily understood by students that are in different ages and have different capabilities as well as • wherever it has been taught, the results were positive and enhanced the mathematical thinking (Skoumpourdi, 2004). According to Fischbein (1984) the reason to introduce probability are “dealing” with uncertain situations, predicting, deciding among different probabilities (critical implementation), problem solving (deliberate actiontaking) and developing the thinking ability different from the deterministic one. Gal (2005), Franklin et al (2005) and Jones (2005) state that the reasons for including probability in schools are related to the usefulness of probability for daily life, its instrumental role in other disciplines, the need for a basic stochastic knowledge in many professions, and the important role of probability reasoning in decision making. Students will meet randomness not only in the mathematics classroom, but also in biological, economic, meteorological, political and social activities (games and sports) settings. As evident, teaching contents in probability have numerous advantages, which other mathematical disciplines lack. Through dealing with the mentioned contents children learn to accept the fact that also negative situations can be encountered, which are not possible to be precisely predicted. The only thing to be done is to critically interpret all the possibilities and choose the one which is most likely to happen. In this way children gather experiences for real life situations, in which it is necessary to https://scientific-jl.com/luch/ 4 4 9 Часть-44_ Том-2_ Май-2025 decide on the best option out of many on a daily basis. At the same time children have to accept the fact that some events are impossible to happen. So, it is necessary to act deliberately and solve the problem, whereby one should make use of his mode of thinking, different from the one applied at learning other mathematical disciplines. (HodnikCadez & Skrbe, 2011). There was very intensive research conducted into the establishment of understanding the probability contents of the early school children in the 70-ies and 80-ies of the last century. These research works, which shall be presented in detail in continuation, were the key starting points of our research. It should be emphasized that the subject matter of understanding the probability contents with the youngest population is still topical, as it also being delved into nowadays. Let us shortly mention some such research works: Gelman and Glickman (2000) researched the importance of the demonstration and concrete experience with teaching probability contents and established that children better understood more difficult concepts if they actively participated in the corresponding demonstrations. Mills (2007) delved into the attitudes of teachers towards probability contents establishing their positive attitude to the statistics and probability contents, and their wish to be offered the possibility of suitable additional training. Ashline and Frantz (2009) dealt with the connection between proportionality and probability contents, while Click (2010) was engaged in probability games played at lessons. Van Dooren et al. (2003) was interested in pupils’ misconceptions pertain