Middle school students’ and preservice teachers’ informal inferences about random walks
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.52041/iase24.201Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to report on the emerging results of a project that used an instructional intervention designed to improve middle school students’ and preservice teachers’ informal expectations of variability in a two-dimensional context based on taking a random walk. Specifically, one aim of the project was to compare how participants reasoned about variability to make informal inferences both before and after modelling a task physically. A simultaneous goal was to have participants pursue their own additional questions, beyond the initial prompts given, inspired by an analysis of the data they had gathered. In the work with preservice teachers, computer simulations were also used to generate more data, which in turn gave rise to more questions about variability and probability.References
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