Student difficulty in the study of probability arises in intuitively-based misconceptions derived from heuristics. One such heuristic, the one of note for this research study, is that of representativeness, in which an individual informally assesses the probability of an event based on the degree to which the event is similar to the sample from…

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 requires public schools in the United States to test students in grades 3-8. The author argues that this mandate has been supported by the public, in part, because of the "availability heuristic," a phenomenon which occurs when people assess the probability of an event by the ease with which instances…

This article reports on a subset of results from a larger study which examined middle and high school students' probabilistic reasoning. Students in grades 5, 7, 9, and 11 at a boys' school (n = 173) completed a Probability Inventory, which required students to answer and justify their responses to ten items. Supplemental clinical interviews…