Emergent reasoning about uncertainty in primary school children with a focus on subjective probability

Abstract

The classical, frequentist and subjective interpretations of probability are the three main perspectives on the quantification of uncertainty. While the first two are emphasised in most school curriculum materials, the subjective notion of probability either is neglected or has minimal mention. Yet, it is closely related to what people commonly use for everyday reasoning. In this chapter, we combine a critical literature review of children's reasoning about uncertainty from both qualitative and quantitative perspectives with an analysis of empirical data. We explore the types of language 7-8-year-old children use to predict and describe outcomes and how they reason about the likelihood of outcomes of chance events using subjective probability evaluations before and after experiment and simulation. Data show that children used chance language relatively accurately to describe the likelihood of chance events and most of them had a quantitative understanding of equal likelihoods. Modifying predictions based on experiment and simulation results seemed to be intuitive for young children.