This semester I have incorporated a three-pronged strategy in my intro statistics classes:

1. Flip the classroom – having students learn material at home
2. Make the classroom more engaging – using more group activities and Learning Catalytics sessions
3. Focus on early inferential statistics early and often

This week began with students learning about the 5-number summary and how to create a boxplot. On Monday we did an activity where students compared two samples of quantitative data in an effort to determine whether the population means were different. That was a natural lead-in to the randomization test for two means, which is an inferential concept that students can handle early in the semester.

Download the Two Mean Randomization project (pdf) here

This project began with the same data as Monday’s activity, and we found that approximately 5% of the trials produced a mean difference at least as extreme as the observed difference between the samples. Most students were slightly below 5% and were able to conclude that there was a difference between the two population means. A few students (and myself) came in at 5% or slightly higher and were not able to conclude that the population means were different (it was plausible that the two population means were equal). This led to a great discussion of how our results varied and the implications of that.

I followed up with two other investigations. The first compared Overall Quality ratings from ratemyprofessors.com for mathematics instructors and English instructors. The second compared Overall Quality ratings for instructors at my college and nearby Fresno State. Students gathered all of the data before showing up for class.

Now that we have discussed many inferential concepts we will write up our first formal hypothesis test tomorrow when trying to determine whether a linear relation exists between two variables. Look for that blog post later this week.