Today was Day #1 (We have a short term in January) in my Applied Statistics class, a course designed for HS juniors & seniors who have not been "successful" in traditional math classes.
We began by watching the first Unit of Against All Odds (What is Statistics?), followed by a discussion of the following scenario:
A medical practice has 11 pediatricians on its staff, 3 males and 8 females. The CEO of the practice is concerned about the small number of male pediatricians as he learns that about 40 percent of the pediatricians in the United States are male, and asks you to investigate whether or not the number of male pediatricians in the practice is consistent with the national pool.
We discussed the CEO's motivation (perhaps a lawsuit!) and the context of the 40% and the 3/11. Surprisingly, most of the students didn't think the ~27% was "unusual". They were given 11-sided dice and they defined an appropriate simulation (11 students each did 9 simulations + 1 extra) and created a dotplot of the number of male pediatricians., followed by a simulation using the one-proportion applet.
We then discussed the significance of our simulated P-Value of 0.21 and the applet simulated P-value of 0.29.
Quite a first day :)
Paul
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Paul L. Myers
Mathematics/Statistics Instructor
Mathematics Department Coordinator
AP Statistics Consultant
The Paideia School
Atlanta, GA
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