High School Students’ Probabilistic Reasoning When Interpreting Media News

Abstract

The purpose of this research was to analyse high school students’ probabilistic reasoning when interpreting news from the media. To fulfil this goal, 76 high school students were given six questions related to a report on traffic accidents taken from the media news. The questions involved some conditional probabilities and the critical reading of the information presented. Although the computation of the complementary event probability was easy, there were more troubles in dealing with other conditional probability questions. Some students relied too much on the authority principle to interpret the data and did not reach a level of critical reading of the information. Finally, few students were able to identify the missing information needed to apply Bayes’ theorem.

Probabilistic literacy and reasoning of prospective secondary school teachers when interpreting media news

“…The percentage of PTs in our sample with biases in conditional probability reasoning was similar to that reported by Álvarez-Arroyo et al (2022b) with high school students.…”

“…These results were similar to those of high school students in Álvarez-Arroyo et al (2022b), although high school students produced a slightly higher number of errors in Question 2.…”

“…Álvarez-Arroyo et al, (2022a, b) analysed high school students' probabilistic reasoning when interpreting news reports. They reported that many students presented the transposed conditional bias and confused conditioning and causation when interpreting conditional probabilities (Álvarez-Arroyo et al, 2022b). Other students failed to compute compound probabilities and interpret small probabilities (Álvarez-Arroyo et al, 2022a).…”

“…1, which are based on a news report about traffic accidents published in Spanish media. The first six questions were adapted from Álvarez-Arroyo et al (2022b), who selected the topic to foster students' interest in statistics and make them aware of the possible effects of alcohol and drug consumption.…”

“…We describe below the categories of responses in questions 1-6, which develop those used by Álvarez-Arroyo et al (2022b). Table 6 with examples of responses to different categories is presented in the Appendix (participants have been coded as Px).…”