ABSTRACT
The goals of this chapter stem from the conjunction of two different recommendations of the mathematics reform movement today. The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) contended that children's mathematics instruction should be grounded in their intuitions, "buil[t] upon the concepts and principles that children already possess" (NCTM, 1989b, p. 33). Both NCTM's influential Curriculum and Evaluation Standards for School Mathematics and the American Statistical Association-NCTM Joint Committee on the Curriculum in Statistics and Probability (1985) contended that statistics and probability belong in the curriculum beginning· at the primary-grade level. If primary-grade teachers are to ground their mathematics instruction in children's ideas, and if they are to include statistics and probability in their curriculum, then they need to know the intuitions relevant to initial statistics and probability that primary-grade children bring to school.
