High School Students’ Probabilistic Reasoning When Interpreting Media News

The purpose of this research was to analyse high school students’ probabilistic reasoning when interpreting news from the media. To fulfil this goal, 76 high school students were given six questions related to a report on traffic accidents taken from the media news. The questions involved some conditional probabilities and the critical reading of the information presented. Although the computation of the complementary event probability was easy, there were more troubles in dealing with other conditional probability questions. Some students relied too much on the authority principle to interpret the data and did not reach a level of critical reading of the information. Finally, few students were able to identify the missing information needed to apply Bayes’ theorem.