Highlights the use of spreadsheets in studying and investigating probabilistic situations with both high school students and preservice mathematics teachers. (ASK)

Presents various simple activities to use with two-color counters as a vehicle for teaching concepts such as observation, classification, counting, recording, graphing, developing relational language, number sense, and beginning ideas of probability. (AIM)

Suggests guided discovery techniques to help students find the rule by which an arrival sequence of consecutively numbered school buses is considered a "success," and presents arguments by Honsberger for a formula to calculate the number of successful patterns for a given number of buses. (SEW)

Two procedures for classifying examinees into categories, one based on the sequential probability ratio test (SPRT) and the other on sequential Bayes methodology, were compared to determine which required fewer items for classification. Results showed that the SPRT procedure requires fewer items to achieve the same accuracy level. (SLD)

Describes a theoretic process to apply Bahadur-Lazarsfeld expansion (BLE) to general probabilistic models and the state-of-the-art 2-Poisson model. Through experiments on two standard document collections, one in Korean and one in English, it is demonstrated that incorporation of term dependences using BLE significantly contributes to performance…

Provides an historical look at probability games of chance and some of the mathematicians involved in the development of basic concepts. Includes exploratory activities for students. (YDS)

Reports on a test of the applicability of the theory of General Scalability to documents in terms of transitivity, substitutability, and independence. Implications for the construction of test collections in information retrieval research are examined. (24 references) (EAM)

Developed are simple recursion formulas for generating the exact distribution of the longest run of heads, both for a fair coin and for a biased coin. Discusses the applications of runs-related phenomena such as molecular biology, Markov chains, geometric variables, and random variables. (YP)

The effect of large, within-examinee item difficulty variability on estimates of the proportion of consistent classification of examinees into mastery categories was studied over 2 test administrations for 100 simulated examinees. The proportion of consistent classifications was adequately estimated using the technique proposed by M. Subkoviak…

Describes a model for geometrical probability. Presents two examples of basic theories of probability using geometrical probability. Provides three problems using the described theorem. (YP)

This article explores an application of combinations, geometric series, and elementary probability that arises in a Biblical setting. Describes examples of the applications such as the use of "urim and thummin." (YP)

An evolved form of the Edwards and Beckworth (1989) model for probability selection for Scholastic Achievement Test takers using truncated normal distributions is presented. It is shown that the arguments of Holland and Wainer are not sufficient to reject this model. (SLD)

Describes an introductory course on data, statistics, and probability given to first-year electronic engineering students at the University of Hull (United Kingdom); it is taught via workshops using spreadsheets. The four components are data and graphs, random data and statistics, probability distributions, and probability and events. (AEF)

Investigates the relationships between the parameters of the Simon-Yule model and the shapes of three bibliometric distributions: Lotka's Law of Scientific Productivity; Bradford's Law of Bibliometric Scattering; and Zipf's Law of Word Frequency. The results indicate that the probability of a new entry determines the characteristics of all three…

Presents a case study of a learner engaged with a probability paradox. The case illustrates a Connected Mathematics Project approach: that primary obstacles to learning probability are conceptual and epistemological and that engagement with paradox can be a powerful means of motivating learners to overcome these obstacles. (71 references)…