Resource Library

This interactive lecture activity motivates the need for sampling. "Why sample, why not just take a census?" Under time pressure, students count the number of times the letter F appears in a paragraph. The activity demonstrates that a census, even when it is easy to take, may not give accurate information. Under the time pressure measurement errors are more frequently made in the census rather than in a small sample.

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.

The purpose of this activity is to enhance students' understanding of various descriptive measures. In particular, by completing this hands-on activity students will experience a visual interpretation of a mean, median, outlier, and the concept of distance-to-mean.

By means of a simple story and a worksheet with questions we guide the students from research question to arriving at a conclusion. The whole process is simply reasoning, no formulas. We use the reasoning already done by the student to introduce the standard vocabulary of testing statistical hypotheses (null & alternative hypotheses, p-value, type I and type II error, significance level). Students need to be familiar with binomial distribution tables. After the ducks story is finished, the class is asked to come up with their own research question, collect the data, do the hypotheses testing and answer their own research question. The teaching material is intended to be flexible depending of the time available. Instructors can choose to do just the interactive lecture type, interactive lecture + activity, or even add the optional material.

This hands-on activity is appropriate for a lab or discussion section for an introductory statistics class, with 8 to 40 students. Each student performs a binomial experiment and computes a confidence interval for the true binomial probability. Teams of four students combine their results into one confidence interval, then the entire class combines results into one confidence interval. Results are displayed graphically on an overhead transparency, much like confidence intervals would be displayed in a meta-analysis. Results are discussed and generalized to larger issues about estimating binomial proportions/probabilities.

In this hands-on activity, students count the number of chips in cookies in order to carry out an independent samples t-test to see if Chips AhoyŒ¬ cookies have a higher, lower, or different mean number of chips per cookie than a supermarket brand. First there is a class discussion that can include concepts about random samples, independence of samples, recently covered tests, comparing two parameters with null and alternative hypotheses, what it means to be a chip in a cookie, how to break up the cookies to count chips, and of course a class consensus on the hypotheses to be tested. Second the students count the number of chips in a one cookie from each brand, and report their observations to the instructor. Third, the instructor develops the independent sample t-test statistic. Fourth, the students carry out (individually or as a class) the hypothesis test, checking the assumptions on sample-size/population-shape.

Tutorial on the ANOVA test in statistics and probability, with a description, formulas, example, and a calculator applet. This is part of the larger site Virtual Statistician at http://web.mst.edu/~psyworld/virtualstat.htm

This visualization activity combines student data collection with the use of an applet to enhance the understanding of the distributions of slope and intercept in simple linear regression models. The applet simulates a linear regression plot and the corresponding intercept and slope histograms. The program allows the user to change settings such as slope, standard deviation, sample size, and more. Students will then see theoretical distributions of the slope and intercept and how they compare to the histograms generated by the simulated linear regression lines.

This site funded by the Kaiser Family Foundation provides information on health care and demographics for the 50 U.S. states. Users can use interactive maps or search by particular characteristics for each state. Tables can be created and copied and there is also direct data download (in Excel format) from this site. The site includes data on median income, gender, ethnicity, medical and drug spending, HIV/AIDS rates, and over 500 other variables at the state level

This pdf text file gives a short introduction to the methods of Bayesian inference. It gives a simple example that deals with jumping a paper frog. The topics listed in this document include: An example, comparison of frequentist and Bayesian methods, credible vs. confidence intervals, choice of prior and its effect on the posterior distribution.