1.3. The Infusion Approach by teaching Unit "Probability in the daily life"
There are two main approaches for fostering CT: the general skills approach, which is characterized by designing
special courses for instructing CT skills, and the infusion approach (Swartz, 1992), which is characterized by
developing these skills by embedding them in the teaching of the set learning material. According to this approach
there is a need to reprocess the prescribed content material in order to integrate the teaching of thinking skills intothe
conventional instruction. In this report, we will show how we integrated the mathematical content of "probability in
daily life” with CT skills from Ennis' taxonomy, reprocessed the curriculum, tested different learning units and
evaluated the subjects' CT skills. One of the overall research purposes was to examine the effect of the infusion
approach on the development of students’ critical thinking skills through probability instruction. The overarching
research purpose was to examine the effect of developing CT by the infusion approach. This evaluation was
undertaken using the Cornell questionnaire (a quantitative test) and quantitative means of analysis .in this learning
unit, which is a part of the formal National Curriculum in Israel, the student is required to analyse problems, raise
questions and think critically about the data and the information. In our research we did it with probability in daily
life.The purpose of the learning unit is not to be satisfied with a numerical answer but to examine the data and its
validity. In cases where there is no single numerical answer, the students are expected to know what questions to ask
and how to analyse the problem qualitatively, not only quantitatively. In addition to being provided with statistical
tools students are encouraged to use their intuitive mechanisms to help them estimate probabilities in daily life.
Simultaneously, students examine the logical premises of these intuitions, while being alerted to possible
misjudgements in their application. Here, the key concepts are: probability rules, conditional probability and Bayes
theorem, statistical relations, causal relations and subjective probability (Liberman & Tversky 2002)