Risk and Bayesian probability in Schools

What can education learn from real-world communication of risk and uncertainty?

Risk is a hot topic, whether it concerns the benefits and harms of screening or the chance of an earthquake. It is challenging to explain both unpredictability and uncertain knowledge to the public, and yet these are also essential elements in education in probability and statistics. Current approaches in communicating risk and uncertainty can contribute substantially to educational practice.

In particular, Gigerenzer's 'natural frequencies' – whole-number outcomes from a defined population of cases – can be adapted to teaching based on a natural sequence of stages: empirical multiple narratives from experimentation represented as 2-way tables and frequency trees, to expected outcomes in multiple future experiments, and finally to probability trees. Issues of relative and absolute risk continually arise in topical stories, and representations that make these transparent are as relevant in the classroom as in the news.