Okay, I’ll bite!
Today with be our fourth class session in this one-semester intro stats course. We meet twice a week for fairly long sessions (now 1:45, but it was only 1:15 when the semester started), and are using the nearly-current (January 2015) version of the ISCAM text (Chance and Rossman).
Since we meet Tuesdays and Thursdays, we don’t meet today, but tomorrow I’ll introduce confidence intervals for the proportion, which appears in ISCAM as “Investigation 1.5.” There is time then to practice that or apply it to different setting (the “Reese’s Pieces” activity, estimating p(orange)) or to let that percolate while we introduce another topic, TBD.
There are several possibilities if we don’t go for the sugar, chocolate, and peanut butter:
* The book has a very nice introduction to power at this point, but I’m not sure I want to go there just yet, and besides, it benefits from Spring Training having started;
* I can do some of the probability that’s in the list of topics I was given for this course; I introduced binomial probabilities last time and it couldn’t hurt to devise a task that let us all see if they understood anything;
* I could leap ahead to a contrasting topic, and introduce sampling, bias, and numerical data in an inference context. ISCAM’s first dip into that is a little later in the first large chapter, an activity about word lengths in the Declaration of Independence. I also have handouts I made for another context of the opening of the first Harry Potter, almost 1000 words.
…
Tim Erickson
Mathematics and Computer Science
Mills College
terickson(a)mills.edu
