Getting Students to put Their Hearts into Statistical Topics

• Activity Number: 25
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Sunday, August 8, 2004 : 2:00 PM to 3:50 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistical Education
• Author(s): Michael C. Mosier*+
• Companies: Washburn University
• Keywords: hands-on experience ; classroom exercise ; teaching sampling distributions ; data collection ; coverage probability

Abstract

In an introductory statistics course, students will generally groan loudly when required to go outside of class and collect some actual data. However, incorporating such a project into the course can have several benefits for the students. It forces them to think about issues involved in the production of quality data, they gain an understanding that "real" data is often messy (unlike most of the datasets they will encounter in the textbook), and finally, the students develop a feeling of ownership of the data. This enhances their interest in what the data has to reveal, and in the proper methods for analyzing it. We suggest a data collection exercise based on heart rate, which is relatively easy to implement, and then show how the resulting data has successfully been used in the classroom to introduce the concepts of the normal distribution, the sampling distribution of sample means, and the coverage probability of confidence intervals. Examples of analyses performed and presentations made using the students' own data will be given, as well as some examples of things that went wrong and sparked some interesting class discussions.