ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the emerging research relating to young children’s mathematical understanding in the area of statistics and probability. We focus our attention on research that examines young children’s statistical understandings as they engage in rich data modelling, mathematical inquiry and cycles of statistical investigation alongside examining their emerging understandings of the big ideas in probability. Specifically, we review research examining young children’s ability to represent and structure data, generate and select attributes, make predictions and generate informal inferences about data. Insights are provided into the crucial role of contexts, the language of chance, understandings of randomness, quantification of chance and combinatorial reasoning. We argue that these studies reveal the nascent potential of young learners to grapple with complex concepts and processes fundamental to statistics and probability. We maintain not only that young children are capable of deeper statistical and probabilistic thinking than was previously thought but that the origins of these ideas appear at ages earlier than generally anticipated.
