Prospective Teachers’ Probabilistic Reasoning When Solving a Sampling Task

The purpose of this report is to describe the probabilistic reasoning of prospective teachers when working with a sampling situation. We analyze written responses of 139 prospective secondary school mathematics teachers to a task where they had to estimate an urn’s composition given a sample of 1000 drawings. Afterwards they had to estimate the probability of the next extraction. Although most teachers built an urn model consistent with the sample selected, few of them used the model to predict the next selection. The study highlights the need to improve the probabilistic reasoning of prospective secondary school mathematics teachers, who, having received formal statistical training, lack an education in the psychological and didactical components of teaching probability.