The concepts of hypothesis testing, trade-offs between Type I and Type II error, and the use of power in choosing an appropriate sample size based on power when designing an experiment are routinely included in many introductory statistics courses. However, many students do not fully grasp the importance of these ideas and are unable to implement them in any meaningful way at the conclusion of the course. This paper presents a number of applets intended to help students understand the role of power in hypothesis testing and which allow them to obtain numerical values without having to perform any calculations for a variety of scenarios, complementing some of the applets presented in Aberson, Berger, Healy, and Romero (2002). Ideas are given about how to incorporate the materials into an introductory course.
The CAUSE Research Group is supported in part by a member initiative grant from the American Statistical Association’s Section on Statistics and Data Science Education