The meaning of randomness for secondary school students

In the experimental study reported here we intended to examine possible dif ferences in secondary students' conceptions about randomness before and aft er instruction in probability, which occurs for the Spanish students betwee n the ages of 14 and 17. To achieve this aim, we gave 277 secondary student s a written questionnaire with some items taken from Green (1989, 1991). Wi th our results we extend Green's previous research to 17-year-old students and complement his results with the analysis of students' arguments to supp ort randomness in bidimensional distributions. Our results also indicate ch at students' subjective understanding of randomness is close to some Interp retations of randomness throughout history.