Research on Teaching and Learning Probability

The 13th International Congress on Mathematical Education took place in July of 2016 in Hamburg, Germany. The booklet under review was one of many prepared for participants at the meeting.

The advertised purpose of the booklets was to update readers on recent developments in mathematics education. In the case of this summary, there is also considerable material on the the history of competing notions of the concept of probability as well as the history of research on that subject.

All that along with numerous research citations means that only the surface is skimmed in these 26 pages, so this would not make for a good overview or summary of recent research or a source of teaching tips for those outside the field.

Now that the Congress has adjourned, this booklet might best be used to give researchers an overview of the field of research into the nature of probability and research on learning and teaching it. It could also be useful to a graduate student looking for a topic for a disseration. The reader will need to be familiar with the jargon of the field and will get more leads than actual results. To aid in pursuing those leads there are seven pages of references.

After a few years in industry, Robert W. Hayden (bob@statland.org) taught mathematics at colleges and universities for 32 years and statistics for 20 years. In 2005 he retired from full-time classroom work. He now teaches statistics online at statistics.com and does summer workshops for high school teachers of Advanced Placement Statistics. He contributed the chapter on evaluating introductory statistics textbooks to the MAA's Teaching Statistics.