Teaching and Learning of Probabilistic Concepts : A Theoretical Study towards the Teaching Material Construction

By employing intuitive heuristics, people are prone to make erroneous intuitive judgments on uncertain events. This proneness reveals two kinds of serious gaps between logic and intuition: the first in application and the second in interpretation. The first one arises from the people\u27s failure in the application of the rules of probability theory to the uncertain events, and the second one from the people\u27s little confidence in the outcome of the application itself. Now, to stop the first gap, mainly two methods are proposed: (1) to incorporate those problems, which cannot be expected by the learners, into the teaching materials, and (2) to develop heuristics which are not only intuitively accessible to the learners but also mathematically correct in the light of probability theory. In order to fill the second gap, the use of appropriate probability experiments is suggested. Only when the naive fallible intuitions are thus overcome by the logic and adequately mathematized, this author asserts, probabilistic concepts for real-life judgments on uncertain events are mastered