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…

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…