Estimative abilities in probabilistic judgments of engineering students.

The paper discusses the interaction between intuitive biases of probabilistic thinking and mathematical knowledge. It would appear that students may answer numerical problems correctly but falter on simple descriptive solutions. Students appear to relinquish formal knowledge for simpler heuristics when attempting to describe the outcome of an event. This paper explores some possible theoretical causes of the dissociation between procedural and estimative abilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]