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

Abstract

This paper reports the results of a didactic engineering proposal for statistical modelling and inquiry in the context of teacher education. The tasks and situations we focus 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.