The role of representations in the understanding of probabilities in tertiary education

This study aims to contribute to the understanding of the approaches students develop and use in solving probabilistic tasks and to examine which approach is more strongly correlated to their success in such tasks. Participants were pre-service teachers from the University of Western Macedonia in Greece. Implicative statistical analysis is applied to evaluate the relation between students’ approach and their ability to solve problems. Our results indicate strongly that students tend to avoid graphical representations and use the algebraic approach instead. Students who are able to coordinate multiple representations show better results in problem solving. In addition, the results suggest that flexibility in using multiple representations is a good predictor for success.