THE FORMALIST MATHEMATICAL TRADITION AS AN OBSTACLE TO STOCHASTICAL REASONING Maria Meletiou-Mavrotheris (Ministry of Education, Cyprus) The research literature in the area of stochastics education indicates that most people, even ones with substantive formal training, tend to think deterministically and to have weak intuitions about the stochastic. In this paper, the argument is made that the persistence of students’ difficulties in reasoning about the stochastic, despite significant reform efforts in statistics education, might be the result of the continuing impact of the formalist mathematical tradition. Deep-rooted beliefs about the nature of mathematics are imported into statistics, affecting curricula and acting as a barrier to instruction that provides students with the skills necessary to recognize uncertainty and variability in the real world. The article first provides an overview of the literature on the formalist view of mathematics and its impact on statistics curricula and instructional approaches. It then reconsiders some well-known empirical findings on students’ understanding of statistics, and forms some hypotheses regarding the link between student difficulties and mathematical formalism. Next, it argues that in order to move away from the formalist mathematical tradition and to improve people’s impoverished probabilistic and statistical reasoning, statistics instruction must put more emphasis on raising students’ awareness of variation and its relevance to statistics. It conjectures that if we provided students with learning environments where they experienced the omnipresence of variation and came to value statistical tools as a means to describe and quantify it, they would develop statistical thinking going beyond the superficial knowledge of terminology, rules and procedures. In order to justify this conjecture, the article discusses the experiences and insights gained from a teaching experiment in an introductory statistics course, which adopted an alternative path to statistics instruction with variation at its core.