Study Bias Issues

A cartoon for use in discussions about how to critique quantitative evidence presented in the media. The cartoon is the work of Theresa McCracken and appears as #7203 on McHumor.com Free for non-profit use in statistics course such as in lectures and course websites.

January 11, 2011 T&L webinar presented by Rakhee Patel(University of California - Los Angeles, UCLA) and hosted by Jackie Miller (The Ohio State University). Since formal hypothesis testing and inference methods can be a challenging topic for students to tackle, introducing informal inference early in a course is a useful way of helping students understand the concept of a null distribution and how to make decisions about whether to reject it. We will present two computer labs, both using Fathom, that illustrate these concepts using permutation in a setting where students will be answering interesting investigative questions with real data.

This tutorial opens with a survey on polling. Upon completing the survey, students are taken through an election example which uses polling to explain random sampling, bias, margin of error, and confidence intervals.

This lesson deals with the statistics of political polls and ideas like sampling, bias, graphing, and measures of location. As quoted on the site, "Upon completing this lesson, students will be able to identify and differentiate between types of political samples, as well as select and use statistical and visual representations to describe a list of data. Furthermore, students will be able to identify sources of bias in samples and find ways of reducing and eliminating sampling bias." A link to a related worksheet is included.