Encourage tinkering with ideas, relationships, connections. Set up situations where students have to find information not readily available in school texts. Provide opportunity for students to design open-ended explorations of the concept. Provide multiple options so students can plan a unique "proof" of learning.
Hands-on experiments.
Objective: To allow the students to try several hands-on experiments and compare the calculated experimental probability to the theoretical probability.
Activity: The teacher sets up a series of experiment stations. Students are instructed to write a report on each experiment. The report must include a short description of what event is being examined in which the students should describe the favorable event in the experiment, figure out the theoretical probability of that favorable event, perform the experiment 20 times and record results, calculate the experimental probability based on results, write a short analysis of the results. Compare the theoretical and experimental probabilities. If there is a great discrepancy, how can it be accounted for? What other factors influenced the results? The experiments for each station are as follows: Rolling a single die to come up with "5." Drawing a certain colored marble from a jar containing a mixture of several marbles in various colors. Flipping a coin to come up "heads." Drawing a face card from a deck of 52 playing cards.
