High-School Teachers' Conditional Probability Knowledge

• Activity Number: 239
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Monday, August 4, 2014 : 2:00 PM to 3:50 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistical Education
• Author(s): Robert Molnar*+
• Companies: University of Georgia
• Keywords: conditional ; probability ; education ; high school ; teachers ; pedagogy

Abstract

The Common Core state standards contain substantially more probability and statistics than most prior curricula. Anecdotal reports suggest that many current teachers have never taught the topics and thus lack pedagogical knowledge. Some current teachers have never even seen the topics and thus lack content knowledge. To examine some of the gaps, I found five tasks that covered Common Core conditional probability topics: a ball drawing game; testing a new cream for treating rashes; reading a table of survey results; finding retest probabilities; and Kahneman & Tversky's taxicab witness problem.

I interviewed approximately 25 practicing United States high school mathematics teachers. During the interviews, participants worked the tasks, explained their solutions, and then discussed possible student approaches and misconceptions. The interviews also included open-ended discussion on the teachers' views about teaching the curriculum. Here, I present the teachers' results, primarily on content knowledge, which show a variety of levels of performance, including some places where teachers may need support and professional development.