Resource Library

A short story that might be used as an out-of-class assignment to facilitate understanding the interpretation of a 95% confidence interval as a random interval that is expected to cover the true parameter in 95% of all samples. The story was written in 2011 by Canadian mathematician Robert Dawson from Saint Mary's University in Halifax Nova Scotia. The story was published as a two part series at www.Lablit.com

A song to be used in discussions about Confidence Intervals. The lyrics were written by Alan Reifman from Texas Tech University and may be sung to the tune of Cat Stevens 1971 hit "Moon Shadow." Musical accompaniment realization and vocals are by Joshua Lintz from University of Texas at El Paso.

The WISE Bootstrapping Applet can be used to demonstrate bootstrapping by creating a confidence interval for a population mean or median. The user can manipulate the population distribution, sample size, and number of resamples. An associated guide gives suggestions for teaching bootstrapping.

No matter how much reverence is paid to anything purporting to be statistics," the term has no meaning unless the source, relevance, and truth are all checked." is a quote by American English professor Tom B. Burnam (1913-1991). The quote is found on page 244 of his 1975 book "The Dictionary of Misinformation".

A cartoon to use when talking about confidence intervals. Cartoon by John Landers (www.landers.co.uk) based on an idea from Dennis Pearl (The Ohio State University). Free to use in the classroom and on course web sites.

In this video (which lasts almost 20 minutes), statistics guru Hans Rosling debunks myths about the so-called "developing world."

This activity illustrates the convergence of long run relative frequency to the true probability. The psychic ability of a student from the class is studied using an applet. The student is asked to repeatedly guess the outcome of a virtual coin toss. The instructor enters the student's guesses and the applet plots the percentage of correct answers versus the number of attempts. With the applet, many guesses can be entered very quickly. If the student is truly a psychic, the percentage correct will converge to a value above 0.5.

This group activity illustrates the concepts of size and power of a test through simulation. Students simulate binomial data by repeatedly rolling a ten-sided die, and they use their simulated data to estimate the size of a binomial test. They carry out further simulations to estimate the power of the test. After pooling their data with that of other groups, they construct a power curve. A theoretical power curve is also constructed, and the students discuss why there are differences between the expected and estimated curves. Key words: Power, size, hypothesis testing, binomial distribution

This lecture example reviews the concept of CIs and their relationship to P values. Tables are provided in pdf format.

A cartoon using a classic quote attributed to Benjamin Disraeli by Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens). Useful for illustrating that statistical methods designed to find truths in data can be abused to the opposite effect. Cartoon by John Landers (www.landers.co.uk) based on an idea from Dennis Pearl (The Ohio State University). Free to use in the classroom and on course web sites.