AUTODIDACTIC LEARNING OF PROBABILISTIC CONCEPTS THROUGH GAMES

Pupils in grades 6-9 without a formal background in probability performed coin-toss game tasks, which led to inventing of probability terminology and understanding of concepts. The pupils were asked to answer questions dealing with the chances that an event would occur in different situations, and to convince their classmates of the correctness of their answers. The principal findings point to intuitive development of probabilistic concepts. Pupils constructed ways to quantify probability using fractions and percentages. Without the intervention of formal teaching, they created a linkage between sample size and probability of an event, and constructed a probabilistic language of their own for mutual communication purposes. This finding partly contradicts previous finding of others that claim there is a tendency to intuitively ignore the influence of the size of the sample when estimating probabilities.