| A study on the misconceptions in high school sophomores of probability can help the teachers gain an idea of how much the students understand the concept,deepen students’ understanding of the concept,and promote their overall development.Therefore,this study is designed to probe into the misconceptions on probability of the students from two aspects: what the misconceptions are and the reasons for such misconceptions.To answer these two questions,a three-tier questionnaire TDIPM incorporating confidence is developed in reference to the two-tier questionnaire framework proposed by Treagust,and questionnaire-based surveys and case interviews are conducted on 297 students from six classes of sophomores from a Hefei high school.After analysis on the collected data with Excel and SPSS19.0 data analysis software,conclusions are drawn: the misconceptions of high school sophomores in respect of the concept of probability are described as below: randomness is irregularity;random events can’t be measured or predicted,and they occur or don’t occur;the probability of random events is not related to repeating experiments;the more experiments,the closer the frequency is to probability;the probability of all possible results in an experiment is the same;probability is naturally related to and is of specific value.Reasons for these misconceptions possibly include: improper analogy in terminology;established experience in life;textbooks;incorrect interpretation to the wording;incorrect inference of knowledge;neglect of sample space.The data analysis also reveals that the students are confident in their answers,but less than half of them are correct;Boys and girls show no remarkable difference in probability misconceptions.For this,the following teaching methods are suggested: create scenarios to trigger true cognitive conflicts;identify the differences and similarities between different concepts by comparison;pay extra attention to wording and master the key attributes of the concept;present a visual demonstration of essence of concept via IT technology;value the students’ points of view and establish scientific concepts. |
