Potential of Brousseau’s guessing game in teacher education: Two complementary cases

Hakamata, R., Fukuda, H., Otani, H., Otaki, K., Barquero, B., & Bosch, M.

This paper reports the results of a didactic engineering proposal for
statistical modelling and inquiry in the context of teacher education.
The tasks and situationswefocus on are related to Brousseau’s guessing
game, which was originally proposed for the teaching of probability
and randomness to primary school students. In this paper, we
describe two different didactic engineering designs based on the
guessing game, which were independently managed by two different
research teams in the context of pre-service teacher education.
One of them is aimed at primary school teachers in Spain, and the
other at secondary school teachers in Japan. The theoretical tools and
design principles employed come from the anthropological theory
of the didactic, especially praxeologies and study and research paths.
The description and comparison of the two cases reveal the potential
of the guessing game for the teaching of statistics in teacher education,
as well as the limitations of the dominant epistemological
models in statistics, for researchers and educators when planning to
work on statistics education.

International Journal of Mathematical Education in Science and Technology

57

7

1538

1558