Course summary

And that’s it! Congratulations on reaching the end of this short course. We hope that you’ve found it both useful and interesting. The end of the course does not have to be the end of your professional learning journey for probability. As we explained at the beginning of the course, everything that we’ve covered in these three weeks has come from our book, ‘Teaching Probability’. We’ve had to be selective about the material that we included in this course, and there is plenty more in the book. So let’s remind ourselves of what we have covered. In week one we thought about probability in general, considered some of the difficulties that are involved in teaching it and outlined a better approach.

Week two developed these ideas in more depth, looking at how they can be extended and applied to the teaching of conditional probability. And this third and final week has looked at preparing students for examination questions, without resorting to learning tricks or remembering rules.

Our approach is based on the following steps:

One: start with a mathematical model of a simplified problem.

Two: get groups to generate data using spinners

Three: tally data using frequency trees and then pool the data to smooth the random variation and ask what we would expect to happen in a future set of experiments.

Five: perhaps supplement with spreadsheet simulations.

Six: move to expected frequency trees.

And seven: compare alternative representations

of data and expected frequencies: trees, two-by-two tables, Venn diagrams.

And eight: finally, we get to probability trees and derive the rules of probability. The comments here are your final chance to have your say about what you have learnt. So please do use them to let us know what was most useful for you what you would change, and what you would like to have seen more of. We know that we cannot please everyone, but we will read all your comments and take them into account when preparing future versions of the course. Thank you all for taking part in the course, and we wish you every success in teaching probability.