JANET AINLEY and DAVE PRATT

INTRODUCING A SPECIAL ISSUE ON CONSTRUCTING

MEANINGS FROM DATA

1. P REAMBLE

The organising theme running through this special issue is ‘construct-

ing meanings from data’. In this introduction, we wish to elaborate this
phrase, which intentionally blurs distinctions between the internal mental
processes, epistemological considerations and pedagogical contexts. This
intent arises from a standpoint in which these three components are seen
as deeply connected, each providing structuring forces upon the others.
To put it simply, a student’s learning in the classroom is self-evidently
contingent upon what that student already knows, on the nature of the
mathematical content being addressed and on external tools and social
resources available within the learning context. What is less obvious is
the relationship between these factors. The juxtaposition of these three
factors in the focus of the work of PME (mapping mental processes onto
Psychology, epistemological processes onto Mathematics and pedagogical
contexts onto Education) reflects the need to articulate this relationship.
John Truran has elaborated further on the emergence of the related areas
of data handling, probability and statistics within the P, the M and the E of
PME in reflections appended at the end of this introduction
Data Handling was chosen as the theme for one of the Research Fora
at PME22 (Summer 1998) in recognition of the growing interest in this
area of mathematics internationally, both in terms of curriculum devel-
opment, and in terms of research within PME. The term ‘data handling’
itself reflects recent changes in the way in which the topic is approached
within the school curriculum, extending ‘graphical representation’ within
the primary age range, and broadening the accessibility of ‘statistics’ in
secondary school. This change has no doubt been influenced by a number
of factors, including the availability of technology, which makes it possible
to handle, and present large quantities of data with ease, the increased
public use and awareness of statistics, and the introduction into school
curricula of notions such as relevance and citizenship. The development

Educational Studies in Mathematics 45: 1–8, 2001.

© 2001 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
2 JANET AINLEY AND DAVE PRATT

of data-handling and statistics at school level has also been influenced by

the work of the International Association for Statistics Education (IASE),
formed by the International Statistics Institute (ISI) in 1991. (See Vere-
Jones, 1995, for an account of this work.) We see the changes in school
curricula as offering an exciting opportunity to develop students’ statistical
intuitions, to foreground the mathematical concepts embedded in statistical
techniques, and to create contexts in which these can be linked to broader
mathematical ideas of symbol use, reasoning and logical necessity.

2. C ONSTRUCTING MEANINGS FROM DATA

Constructing meanings from data is used to encompass the psycho/pedago-

gical processes when students engage in a range of activities, which we see
as essentially mathematical, involving the meaningful manipulation and
interpretation of data. Although the dialectic relationship between these
three components suggests that they be researched and discussed in par-
allel, we will now separate them (temporarily) as an artifice to discuss
further this central notion. We make another mapping, this time from con-
structing – meanings – from data, onto mental processes epistemological
considerations and pedagogical contexts, respectively.

2.1. Psychological: CONSTRUCTING meanings from data

When a child or a group of children is in possession of data, how do they
mentally transform that set of numbers, characters or figures into mean-
ingful information (even assuming that transformation is an appropriate
metaphor to describe the process)? This is a deep question and is at the
heart of research into the construction of meanings from data.
Many teachers recognise the importance that children are given space
to become familiar with the data on which they are working. The children
may be involved in creating the data themselves but often in practice they
are using prepared data. McClain and Cobb elaborate this issue in their
article in this issue. The data-creation process provides a means for con-
structing initial meanings for the numbers themselves, but the construction
of meanings for data must extend well beyond appreciation at that level.
We must ask how children construct meanings for functions of that data,
such as average, trend, dispersion and distribution.
Technology has a significant role to play in coming to understand how
children can construct meanings for such functions. It can provide a means
for changing the focus of attention away from the numbers themselves so
that a more global appreciation of the data might lead to the construc-
 INTRODUCING A SPECIAL ISSUE 3

tion of meanings for objects that do not exist explicitly in the data but
can only exist as mental constructions. Technology can provide quasi-
concrete manifestations of those constructions that can be manipulated
on screen directly by the child. The processes change from being gen-
erational as in computing an average to transformational as in resizing a
computer-generated graph. Perhaps this switch in attention provides a key
to understanding how the abstraction process operates.
In his article in this issue, Greer describes Fischbein’s theoretical frame-
work, based on the notion of intuitions. Indeed, we might expect that
children already possess intuitions that would support the constructions
of meanings for these sorts of functions of data. If so, what do they look
like, and how might they further develop? If not, what sorts of activities
might support the construction of intuitions?
The construction of such intuitions is unlikely to depend solely on
the nature of the activities themselves but is likely to be situated in the
wider setting, including the cultural expectations of the classroom. In their
article in this issue, McClain and Cobb discuss the construction of socio-
mathematical norms during data handling activities.
Exploratory Data Handling (EDA) has become a popular means of
teaching statistics but little is known about the psychological processes
that underpin that type of activity. We return to EDA later but mention at
this point the article by Ben-Zvi and Arcavi in this issue, which begins to
unravel what it might mean to ‘know EDA’.
While not necessarily based on a single psychological perspective, the
research presented in the various papers in this issue emerges as broadly
constructivist in approach. The articles by Ainley, Pratt and Nardi, Mc-
Clain and Cobb, Nemirovsky and Tierney, Ben-Zvi and Arcavi each report
on innovative teaching approaches but the research methods and the theor-
etical frameworks used go beyond looking at effective teaching approaches
to consider the ways that meanings are constructed by individuals, and
shaped by social interaction.

2.2. Epistemological: Constructing MEANINGS from data

In this section, we discuss mathematical content: what we have described
as the mapping between epistemological considerations and constructing
meanings from data. Our focus is on the meanings, which we see as es-
sentially mathematical, which may be constructed through the purposeful
manipulation and interpretation of data. Although this description covers a
broad range of activities, including many of those traditionally associated
with the study of statistics and probability, our focus explicitly excludes
what we may call ‘outcome-oriented’ activities, in which the aim is to
4 JANET AINLEY AND DAVE PRATT

produce results from data without necessarily attending to the meanings of

either the content of the data or the processes employed to produce such
results.
Outcome-oriented activities, in which statistical techniques are applied
to sets of data, and the results used within the solution of other prob-
lems, are typical of the uses of statistics within many curriculum areas.
For example, consider a science lesson in which the aim is to study the
effect of gravity on a falling object. The lesson may require students to
measure the time taken for an object to fall a certain distance. In order
to ensure appropriate data, students may be instructed to repeat each trial
several times, and to use the mean average time. The aim of this lesson
is to generate the data in order to study the effect of gravity. The notion
of average is subsidiary to this aim. In such activities, the statistical tech-
niques are used as tools, which are of little or no intrinsic interest. Their use
will generally be learned procedurally because the emphasis is on the use
of the results, rather than on their conceptual basis. The science teacher
in the example above is likely to place little emphasis on average as a
concept. This application of mathematical ideas to produce results for non-
mathematical purposes is in many ways distinct from the concerns of math-
ematics education. Until relatively recently, this non-mathematically based
use of statistics was unique to University level education, and the students
concerned generally had weak mathematical backgrounds, leading to par-
ticular pedagogic difficulties. This has lead to the historical separation of
statistics education from mathematics education, and particularly to the
division between research in the two areas, which is only now beginning
to be bridged.
In contrast, we are concerned with ‘concept-oriented’ activities, which
have the aim of providing opportunities for the construction of mean-
ings for powerful statistical ideas, such as average, variation, randomness,
distribution, association, trend, the application of such ideas in solving
problems, applying mathematical models to data and understanding the
role of such models. The distinction between the two approaches lies in
the relative emphasis placed on different aspects by teachers and by pupils.
For example, the gravity experiment described above could equally well
be used in a mathematics lesson with the explicit purpose of providing
opportunities for the students to construct meanings for average from the
data. A mathematics teacher may place emphasis on average as a ‘bet-
ter’ estimator, and perhaps study the properties of different averages as
calculated from the data generated. The distinction is more subtle than
might first be thought. In the science lesson above, the student may well
construct a meaning for average, which is to do with its utility. Because
 INTRODUCING A SPECIAL ISSUE 5

average was used in a particular way in order to make sense of a gravit-

ational experiment, the student may abstract a meaning that enables that
student to approach a future experiment using average. Nevertheless, one
assumes that a utility for average would be more likely to be constructed
when the mathematics teacher designs specific activities with that aim.
For example, a computer-based lesson might allow the student to generate
averages in a black-box way, paying little or no attention to how the av-
erage is calculated. The activity may be designed in order to focus on the
relationship between the average as generated by the computer and sets of
data needing to be compared. By placing stress on the behaviour of average
as a mathematical meaning (and placing correspondingly less emphasis on
how it is calculated), the teacher may optimise the chance that the student
will come to understand how and why average can be useful in making
sense of data.
There are parallels here with Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA), which
is an approach to data analysis developed by Tukey (1962) that has proved
powerful in pedagogic settings. EDA is concerned with organizing, de-
scribing, representing, and analysing data, and makes extensive use of
visual displays, most often through the use of technology. In the same way
that we envisage above the student constructing meanings from data for
the utility of average, we recognise that EDA encourages the construc-
tion of meanings for various statistical concepts through the exploration of
data. Furthermore, by starting from data, the student using the computer to
explore average is not immediately confronted with the underlying math-
ematical model (the calculation, say, of mean average) just as the student of
EDA has freedom to explore without being constrained by the underlying
model for classical inferential statistics, probability. There is an irony here.
Conventionally probability would be seen as the mathematical component
of statistics. From this perspective, it might be argued that, by not mak-
ing probability central to statistics, EDA is essentially non-mathematical.
Similarly there is an argument that, by avoiding a focus on how average
is generated, the computer-based lesson is essentially non-mathematical.
However we disagree with this perspective. We take the view that the
activities of EDA, and the exploratory approach which is central to its
philosophy, are essentially mathematical. Similarly, our view is that there
are many meanings for concepts like average and that the generational
meanings are no more important than say meanings for the utility and role
of average.
Our emphasis within this Special Issue is on research into the construc-
tion of meanings for statistical concepts. Examples of activities described
within this issue reflect a focus on concepts such as trend, randomness,
6 JANET AINLEY AND DAVE PRATT

and average. A subset of meanings relating to the content of data will be

meanings that relate to other areas of mathematics. For example, Ainley,
Pratt and Nardi describe an activity called Display Area in which pupils
explore the maximum area for a rectangle with a given perimeter. This
activity is carried out using the Active Graphing approach, which emphas-
ises the interpretation of scattergraphs, and fits into a sequence of activities
with the same theme. However, the same activity could also be developed
to focus more on the geometrical properties of rectangles, and generalising
relationships. We emphasise this possibility in order to draw attention to
another boundary in our interest. A typical activity on number patterns,
leading to the use of algebraic notation to generalise relationships, might
involve pupils in investigating the numbers of matchsticks used to make
each of a sequence of growing shapes. The data from this investigation is
recorded in a table in order to make it easier to recognise the rule connect-
ing the position of the shape in the sequence to the number of matchsticks
used.
This activity has superficial similarities to some concept-oriented activ-
ities (cf. Display Area), but it differs from them in two significant ways.
First, there is no emphasis in this activity on statistical concepts, or any
real use of them in solving the problem. Secondly, the data that is obtained
during this activity has a regularity which makes it quite different in nature
from the more ‘messy’ data obtained from experimental or survey data.
The juxtaposition of these two kinds of data can be very effective in the
construction of meanings for data from different sources, but activities that
deal only with rule-bound data are unlikely to be productive contexts for
the construction of statistical meanings. Ben-Zvi and Arcavi elaborate on
this point in their article in this issue.

2.3. Pedagogical: Constructing of meanings FROM DATA

In this sub-section, we elaborate upon the mapping between pedagogical
contexts and the notion of constructing meanings from data. Although in
the previous section we have stressed the epistemological division between
a focus on the content and context of data, and a focus on statistical con-
cepts, we believe that the richness of many activities, and their power to
engage pupils’ interest, lies in these dual fields of meaning. However, this
duality also presents a challenge for teachers in ensuring that their inten-
tions for the activity are reflected in pupils’ perceptions of its purpose.
The design of the activities described within this issue reflects a clear epi-
stemological focus on concepts such as trend, association, randomness and
average, and also psycho / pedagogic approaches which encourage explor-
ation, problem solving and reasoning through the use of meaningful data.
 INTRODUCING A SPECIAL ISSUE 7

‘Data’ in this context could refer broadly to both descriptive and numerical
data, although in most cases the emphasis is numerical. The data may come
from a variety of sources: collected from experiments or surveys carried
out by pupils themselves, from mathematical investigations, invented data
provided by teachers or textbook authors, or extracted from ‘real world’
sources, such as Government statistics. However the pupils’ understanding
of the data, and of how it has (ostensibly) been obtained emerges as crucial
to their construction of mathematical meanings.
Again, there is a connection with Exploratory Data Analysis, discussed
in the previous section. The use of ‘exploratory’ suggests the analogy of
making sense of data, like an explorer of unknown lands (Cobb and Moore,
1997). EDA studies patterns, centres, clusters, gaps, spreads, and variations
in data, and its essence can be captured by the slogans – look at the data
(preliminary analysis), look between the data (comparisons), look beyond
the data (informal inference) and look behind the data (context) (Shaugh-
nessy et al., 1996). Pedagogically, EDA is an opportunity for open-ended
data exploration by students, aided by basic concepts of descriptive statist-
ics, foregrounding data and making the mathematical model, probability,
subsidiary. There are sound pedagogic reasons for this approach:
From the point of view of the development of understanding, however, we be-
lieve that statistics is more basic than probability: whereas variability in data
can be perceived directly, chance models can be perceived only after we have
constructed them in our own minds. In the ideal Platonic world of mathematics,
we can start with a probabilistic chicken and use deductive logic to lay a statistical
egg, but in the messier world of empirical science, we must start with the egg
as observed data and construct a prior probabilistic chicken as an inference. In
an introductory statistics course, the chicken’s only value is to explain where
eggs come from. It seems a bit unfair, in that context, at least, to ask beginning
students to learn about egg-generators before they’ve become familiar with eggs.
(Cobb and Moore, 1997, p. 820)

In a similar way, activities that focus on the construction of meanings from

data, place emphasis on starting with the data rather than the mathemat-
ical model. We would add that the construction of utility-type meanings
from data does not exclude the construction of meanings for the under-
lying model. Indeed a major challenge for mathematics education is to
find pedagogic approaches which offer opportunities to make connections
between utility meanings, as might be constructed through informal ex-
ploration, and generational meanings, as usually expressed through formal
mathematical language. Pratt (2000) has discussed how young children,
using a specially designed computational medium, were able to make con-
nections between the behaviour of computer-based coins, spinners and dice
(gadgets) and the mathematical encapsulation of how those gadgets were
8 JANET AINLEY AND DAVE PRATT

controlled by the computer, or crucially by the child who could edit the
way in which the gadgets were controlled. In Cobb and Moore’s terms,
we need to find ways of helping children to connect the egg with the
egg-generator.
The emphasis on statistical concepts is achieved in different ways within
the design of activities and teaching approaches across the articles in this
issue. Nemirovsky and Tierney explore children’s representations for situ-
ations that change over time. Their tasks are designed to enable children
to make direct constructions from visible elements, avoiding intermediate
processes. Ainley, Pratt and Nardi’s activities also avoid procedures to gen-
erate representations in order that the children are able to focus directly on
interpretation, in particular on trend. McClain and Cobb place emphasis
in their activities on the need for children to construct meanings for the
data. Thus, data that is prepared, they argue, needs considerable discussion
before the children’s subsequent analytical or representational work could
be grounded in the context. They outline some simple technological tools
that again do some of the computational work to enable the children to
focus on matters of interpretation but in their simplicity point towards the
critical design elements of such software. Ben-Zvi and Arcavi report on
EDA activity and how it might be possible to pin down what it means to
learn EDA.

R EFERENCES

Cobb, G.W. and Moore, D.S.: 1997, ‘Mathematics, statistics and teaching’, The American
Mathematical Monthly 104(9), 801–823.
Pratt, D.: 2000, ‘Making sense of the total of two dice’, Journal for Research in
Mathematics Education 31(5), 602–625.
Shaughnessy, J.M., Garfield, J. and Greer, B.: 1996, ‘Data handling’, in A.J. Bishop,
K. Clements, C. Keitel, J. Kilpatrick and C. Laborde (eds.), International Handbook
of Mathematics Education, Dordrecht, Netherlands, Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp.
205–237.
Tukey, J.: 1962, The future of data analysis. Annals of Mathematical Statistics 33, 1–67.
Vere-Jones, D.: 1995, ‘The coming of age of statistical education’, International Review
63(1), 3–23.

Mathematics Education Research Centre,

Institute of Education,
University of Warwick
 JOHN TRURAN

POSTSCRIPT: RESEARCHING STOCHASTIC UNDERSTANDING –

THE PLACE OF A DEVELOPING RESEARCH FIELD IN PME

Balacheff (1997) has emphasised that PME needs to remember that it is

concerned with a trinity – psychology, mathematics, and education – and
that no one of these may be neglected without some loss of balance. So
it may be helpful to use this classification to trace briefly some aspects of
the development of stochastics education and research to provide a back-
ground for understanding the place of the PME Stochastics Group in the
research process.
Let us first consider ‘Education’, in particular within secondary and
primary schools. All three components of stochastics were developing
strongly as academic disciplines in universities by the end of the nineteenth
century. However, their influence in schools was very small. In texts like
Todhunter (1875) we can see how combinatorics had a small place in the
academic school curriculum, where it was seen as an adjunct of algebra.
Symmetric probability was sometimes associated with combinatorics, but
the subject was treated quite superficially. Statistics received even less
attention.
Yet there were strong advocates for stochastics. Lupton (1892) argued
for probability as being valuable in a general secondary education course
as a result of his work as a teacher of experimental chemistry and his
concern to put imprecisions in measurement onto a sound theoretical foot-
ing. Bibby (1994) has shown the importance of statistics in the education
provided within the Mechanics Institutes of the late nineteenth century,
and in about 1902 Wells presented his much misquoted belief that it would
soon “be as necessary to compute, to think in averages and maxima and
minima, as . . . to read and write” (reprinted in Wells, 1914, p. 204). There
were further pleas for statistics in the 1920s, partly to gain support for the
eugenics movement (Hope-Jones, 1924), and in the 1930s as part of the
‘education for life’ movement (Hamley, 1938) and about 1960 a strong
plea for extensive statistical teaching in the first two years of secondary
schooling on educational grounds was presented by the academics who
constituted the Cambridge Conference on School Mathematics (1959).
Probability and statistics did enter academic school courses in the west-
ern world as part of the ‘new mathematics’ changes of the 1960s. Indeed

Educational Studies in Mathematics 45: 9–13, 2001.

© 2001 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
10 JOHN TRURAN

it is one of the few new topics to have survived the last forty years. But,
as may be seen, for example, in School Mathematics Project (1967, p.
1), the rationale for its introduction was based more on practical or aca-
demic grounds than on a deep educational belief in its importance as part
of a general education. Only from the late 1980s have probability and
statistics been widely and officially seen as educationally important for
both primary and junior secondary students. The curriculum documents of
this period, of which Australian Education Council (1991) is typical, have
finally responded to claims that have gone back more than a century. But
this support for the topic has not been matched by the development of a
strong pedagogy, and, as Callingham, Watson, Collis and Moritz (1995)
and others have shown, many teachers still feel insecure teaching any form
of stochastics, particularly probability and inferential statistics. Stochastics
may have found a place within mathematics education, but this place is not
yet secure.
When we consider the ‘Mathematics’ of stochastics, we find that the
topic seems to be less well defined than for many other mathematical
topics. Probabilists may be crudely placed into two warring camps – the
Bayesians and the others (or the other way round, depending on one’s per-
spective). Statisticians are divided between the theorists and the data ana-
lysts. Such divisions are more than the traditional divisions between pure
and applied mathematicians. They represent significant changes in under-
standing of the potential of statistical reasoning, driven in part by increased
computing power, but also by a growing appreciation that, for example,
data mining can find valid meanings which are invisible to traditionally
trained eyes (Mackinnon and Glick, 1999).
At the same time as academic statisticians are working through a growth
period in their subject, they have become less involved with the construc-
tion of school syllabuses. The changes of the last twenty years, which have
been similar in many western countries, have been driven, as Horwood
(1994) has shown for the Australian state of Victoria, more by teachers and
mathematics educators than by professional mathematicians. This repres-
ents a significant shift in influence when compared with the changes of the
1960s.
Finally, there has been some debate as to whether stochastics may be
rightly seen as a part of mathematics, or as a subject in its own right. Indeed
the issue was debated at the PME Research Forum in 1998, which formed
the inspiration for this Special Issue. To this author the debate has some
similarities with the debates of the 1960s about which subject curriculum
could best contain the new topic of ‘computers’. Initially, it was seen as
part of mathematics, and it was only as computers improved and teach-
 POSTSCRIPT: RESEARCHING STOCHASTIC UNDERSTANDING 11

ers developed a wider vision of their potential that the question (which
implied that there was a single place) was seen as poorly formed. But
whatever the best answer to this debate about mathematics and statistics, it
is clear that many organisations, journals and conferences have developed
which specialise in the teaching of statistics (a term which often subsumes
probability and the now much less popular combinatorics). Those with
an interest in stochastics teaching can maintain professional contacts with
each other but not with other mathematics teachers far more easily than
can, for example, professionally involved teachers of algebra or geometry.
It is this relative isolation of stochastics that is of special relevance to
the PME Stochastics Group and to the third aspect of Balacheff’s trinity –
psychology.
Some of the earliest psychological research into understanding of chance
was done by Loosli-Usteri (1931), and between 1936 and 1944 Piaget
conducted a number of major experiments in Geneva. However, apart from
one paper, it was not until the publication of Piaget and Inhelder (1951) that
this work was made available to Francophones. Anglophones had to wait
until 1975 for a translation. Although this work is some of the easiest of
Piaget’s work to understand, it has received relatively little attention other
than lip-service. It tends to be seen as a side-line to Piaget’s general model
of development. Although Piaget (1971, 1981, 1983) has subsequently dis-
cussed causality, possibility and necessity, neither Piaget nor other workers
have linked this work with his earlier work in chance. We are faced with an
interesting situation where what many see as seminal work in stochastics
learning research is rarely used in practice.
Another curious situation is that at just the same time that Piaget and
Inhelder (1951) was translated into English Fischbein (1975) published his
important and still valuable work on intuition and probability, which was
based on many years of research. Although this was published at just the
time when Fischbein and others were establishing PME, probability did
not play a major part in PME deliberations, and it was only in the years just
before his death that Fischbein once again presented papers on stochastics,
principally on probability and combinatorics.
But probability did attract the attention of many psychologists who
had no immediate interest in mathematics education Brainerd (1981) and
Teigen (1983) are two moderately well-known examples, but there are
many more. Stochastics researchers have a vast relatively unexplored col-
lection of data from the psychological literature, which could be used to
support their studies.
From about 1975 stochastics teaching and learning started to attract
increasing interest among researchers. It would be invidious to attempt
12 JOHN TRURAN

to isolate individuals, but the doctoral dissertations on stochastics learn-

ing and their subsequent involvement in the mathematics education com-
munity by Green (1982) and Shaughnessy (1977) have been two of the best
known. More recently, the research school in the Department of Math-
ematics and Science Education at Granada, Spain, led by Batanero and
Godino has produced many investigations of statistical understanding, of
which Batanero, Godino, Vallecillos, Green and Holmes (1994) is one ex-
ample. Similarly English (1991) is one example of recent work in combin-
atorics learning. The many workers which have followed these and other
leaders have had the benefit of the informally structured ‘International
Study Group for Research on Learning Probability and Statistics’ estab-
lished in 1982 by a number of people including Fischbein, and initially led
by Green. They have also been able to present papers at the four-yearly
International Conferences on the Teaching of Statistics (ICOTS).
The articles in this special edition of ESM may be seen in the context
of research in stochastics education. To some extent they are a product of
its past, but equally they are helping to form its future.

R EFERENCES

Australian Education Council: 1991, A National Statement on Mathematics for Aus-

tralian Schools, Curriculum Corporation for the Australian Education Council, Carlton,
Victoria.
Balacheff, N.: 1977, ‘The P, M and E of PME’, PME News November 1977, 6.
Batanero, C., Godino, J.D., Vallecillos, A., Green D.R. and Holmes, P.: 1994, ‘Errors and
difficulties in understanding elementary statistical concepts’ International Journal of
Mathematics Education, Science and Technology 25(4), 527–547.
Bibby, J.: 1994, ‘Teaching statistics in Victorian England – The other side of the Darwinian
coin?’ Teaching Statistics 16(1), 26–28; 16(2), 45–46.
Brainerd, C.J.: 1981, ‘Working memory and the developmental analysis of probability
judgement’ Psychological Review 88(6), 463–502.
Cambridge Conference on School Mathematics: 1963, Goals for School Mathematics,
Houghton Mifflin, Boston.
Callingham, R.A., Watson, J.M., Collis, K.F. and Moritz, J.B.: 1995, Teacher attitudes
towards Chance and Data’, in B. Atweh and S. Flavel (eds.), MERGA 18: Galtha, Pro-
ceedings of the eighteenth annual conference of the Mathematics Education Research
Group of Australasia (MERGA), MERGA, Darwin, pp. 143–150.
English, L.D.: 1991, ‘Young children’s combinatoric strategies’, Educational Studies in
Mathematics 22, 451–474.
Fischbein, E.: 1975, The Intuitive Sources of Probabilistic Thinking in Children, D. Reidel,
Dordrecht Netherlands.
Green, D.R.: 1982, Probability Concepts in School Pupils Aged 11–16 Years, PhD thesis:
Loughborough University of Technology.
Hamley, H.R.: 1938 ‘The teaching of post-primary mathematics’, in K.S. Cunningham
and W.C. Radford (eds.), Education for Complete Living, The Challenge of Today,
 POSTSCRIPT: RESEARCHING STOCHASTIC UNDERSTANDING 13

Proceedings of the New Education Fellowship Conference held in Australia August 1

to September 20, 1937. Australian Council for Educational Research, Melbourne, pp.
356–359.
Hope-Jones, W.: 1924, ‘A plea for teaching probability in schools’, Mathematical Gazette
XII(171), 139–157.
Horwood, J.: 1994, ‘Towards control of a mathematics curriculum’, Curriculum Perspect-
ives 14(1), 11–16.
Loosli-Usteri, M.: 1931 ‘La notion du hasard chez l’enfant’, Archives de Psychologie 23,
43–66.
Lupton, S.: 1892, ‘On the educational value of the theory of probability’, Journal of
Education 276, 357–359 (1 Jul 1892).
Mackinnon, M.J. and Glick, N.: 1999, ‘Data mining and knowledge discovery in data bases
– An overview’, Australian & New Zealand Journal of Statistics 41(3), 255–275.
Piaget, J.: 1971, translated (1974) by D. and M. Miles, Understanding Causality, W.W.
Norton, New York.
Piaget, J.: 1981, translated (1987) by H. Feider, Possibility and Necessity, Volume 1.
The Role of Possibility in Cognitive Development, University of Minneapolis Press,
Minneapolis.
Piaget, J.: 1983, translated (1987) by H. Feider, Possibility and Necessity, Volume 2.
The Role of Necessity in Cognitive Development, University of Minneapolis Press,
Minneapolis.
Piaget, J. and Inhelder, B.: 1951, ‘La Genèse de l’Idée de Hasard chez l’Enfant’, Translated
(1975) by L. Leake jr, P.D. Burrell and H.D. Fischbein, The Origin of the Idea of Chance
in Children, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London.
School Mathematics Project: 1967, Teachers’ Guide for Book 3, Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom.
Shaughnessy, J.M.: 1977, ‘Misconceptions of probability: an experiment with a small-
group, activity-based, model-building approach to introductory probability at the College
level’, Educational Studies in Mathematics 8, 295–316.
Todhunter, I.: 1875, Algebra for the Use of Colleges and Schools, Macmillan, London.
Teigen, K.H.: 1983 ‘Studies in subjective probability I: prediction of random events’,
Scandinavian Journal of Psychology 24, 13–25.
Wells, H.G.: 1914, Mankind in the Making, Chapman & Hall, London.

Private Practise,
Adelaide