This book has been written to fIll a substantial gap in the current
literature in mathemat- ical education. Throughout the world, school
mathematical curricula have incorporated probability and statistics as
new topics. There have been many research papers written on specifIc
aspects of teaching, presenting novel and unusual approaches to
introducing ideas in the classroom; however, there has been no book
giving an overview. Here we have decided to focus on probability, making
reference to inferential statistics where appropriate; we have
deliberately avoided descriptive statistics as it is a separate area and
would have made ideas less coherent and the book excessively long. A
general lead has been taken from the fIrst book in this series written
by the man who, probably more than everyone else, has established
mathematical education as an aca- demic discipline. However, in his
exposition of didactical phenomenology, Freudenthal does not analyze
probability. Thus, in this book, we show how probability is able to
organize the world of chance and idealized chance phenomena based on its
development and applications. In preparing these chapters we and our
co-authors have reflected on our own acquisition of probabilistic ideas,
analyzed textbooks, and observed and reflect- ed upon the learning
processes involved when children and adults struggle to acquire the
relevant concepts.