Providing Insights into the Intended Curriculum of Probability for Basic Education Sector in Egypt from a Comparative Perspective

Abstract

In Egypt, the curricula delay in updating and stagnation behind modern educational trends represents a challenge, which may hinder education quality. Hence, to respond to such a national challenge, there is a need to review the curricula in light of modern educational trends, particularly in the case of probability where it has emerged as a mainstream strand in mathematics curricula worldwide. Moreover, according to the International Mathematics and Science Study 2003 and 2007, Egyptian students’ achievement in “data and chance” is the lowest among other mathematics areas. Therefore, this study aims at providing insights into the intended curriculum of probability (ICoP) in Egypt from a comparative perspective with the New Zealand curriculum, which works as a model for curriculum development in other countries. The summative content analysis approach has been utilized to explore and quantify the primary probabilistic entities’ usage in the official documents of both countries’ curricula and ensure the consistency between them though assigning the fundamental probabilistic ideas. The study revealed that the ICoP in Egypt is consistent with the New Zealand curriculum in strengthening the probabilistic ideas that are relevant to randomness, events and sample space, and modeling and simulation. However, the ideas of independence and conditional probability, probability distribution and expectation, and convergence and the law of large numbers have not yet been considered in Egypt. Therefore, curriculum developers should look critically at these ideas and address them within teacher education programs. Moreover, explore how to enhance students’ probabilistic reasoning represents an expected schema for further research.