Learning probability at grade 2: exploring the role of drawings for children’s understanding

Abstract

One of the challenges of Mathematics Education in primary school is to introduce probabilistic thinking when the understanding and use of ratios is not yet well developed. Seminal studies in Mathematics Education about probabilistic thinking focus their attention on misconceptions. Notwithstanding their importance, our study draws on an alternative approach to probabilistic thinking, which shift the attention from the mere realm of intuitions to the intertwined nature of intuitions, procedures and representations. Within the MaTEs Italian project, a task on probability is assigned to grade-2 students and the analysis of children’s drawings reveal that also children at this young age are able to identify and employ the mathematical features of a probabilistic task in order to answer it correctly, but the majority fails to provide a written justification for their (correct) choices.