Probabilistic literacy and reasoning of prospective secondary school teachers when interpreting media news Álvarez Arroyo, Rocío Batanero Bernabéu, Carmen Gea Serrano, María Magdalena Teacher education Didactic-mathematical knowledge Probabilistic reasoning and literacy Secondary education Media news Educating students to apply probability literacy and reasoning in out-of-school contexts requires the previous preparation of teachers, which should include the assessment of their mathematical and didactic knowledge. Consequently, we investigated three research questions concerning the probabilistic reasoning and literacy of 66 prospective secondary school teachers when solving probability questions related to a report taken from the media news, their ability to identify the fundamental stochastic ideas needed to solve the task, and their capacity to predict their students’ potential difficulties. The participants needed to compute the probability of a complementary event, several conditional probabilities, and perform critical reading of the information in the report. Despite the participants’ good mathematical knowledge, a high percentage showed reasoning biases, such as the fallacy of the transposed conditional, confusion between conditioning and causation, and few identified the information missing to solve a question. There was a poor capacity to determine the stochastic ideas needed to solve the questions, beyond probability, sample space, conditional probability, and sampling. The participants quoted a few potential errors of their students, mainly conceptual mistakes with scarce recognition of interpretation errors. These results reveal the need to reinforce teachers’ probabilistic literacy, reasoning, and related didactic knowledge. 2024-05-14T06:24:21Z 2024-05-14T06:24:21Z 2024-05-11 info:eu-repo/semantics/article Álvarez-Arroyo, R., Batanero, C. & Gea, M.M. Probabilistic literacy and reasoning of prospective secondary school teachers when interpreting media news. ZDM Mathematics Education (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11858-024-01586-8 https://hdl.handle.net/10481/91720 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11858-024-01586-8 eng http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 Internacional Springer Nature