Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Although research has found many flaws in people's probabilistic reasoning, we have found that middle-school students have many productive ideas about probability. This study examines the probabilistic reasoning used by middle-school students as they used a technology-mediated inquiry environment that was concepmalized and developed to engage students in the task of analyzing the fairness of games of chance. This research demonstrates that students employ productive probabilistic reasoning when participating in this task, and also demonstrates that commonly reported heuristics such as representativeness do not adequately describe student reasoning.