Students’ understanding of randomness after an introductory tertiary statistics course

Random sampling and random allocation are essential processes in the practice of inferentialstatistics. These processes ensure that all members of a population are equally likely to beselected, and that all possible allocations in an experiment are equally likely. It is thesecharacteristics that allow the validity of the subsequent calculations that use probabilisticreasoning. This paper suggests that despite the importance of these processes, students maypoorly understand the characteristics of these processes, and the reasons for them. The paperconcludes with suggestions for the improvement of teaching these topics