Work in progress - commonsense probability: preconceptions of entering engineering students

We asked students to answer a question about the probability of a sequence of events - a soccer team winning at least seven games in an eight-game season, given that the probability of winning each game is one half. While relatively few of the answers were totally correct, nearly all showed understanding of some of the aspects of combining event probabilities. Additionally, the answers illustrated which aspects of the problem the students understood (or did not understand): independence, combining probabilities of independent events, the difference between exactly seven and at least seven, how to determine the outcome space, and so forth. Some of these partial understandings correspond to misconceptions reported in the statistics education literature. As the goal of this work is to characterize incoming engineering students' understanding of probability, we will be collecting data using these and other questions at multiple institutions.