A Motivating Example for ANOVA Using Candies

• Activity Number: 196
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Monday, August 2, 2010 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistical Education
• Author(s): Todd A. Schwartz*+
• Companies: The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
• Keywords: ANOVA ; education ; M&Ms ; non-statisticians

Abstract

Students with little statistical background often may not make the connection between a statistical method and its potential applications. Stimulating hands-on exercises can help remedy this issue. I will describe a successful experiment in a course on analysis of variance (ANOVA) for nursing students. The class is randomly divided into groups, each group is given packets of a variety of candy (e.g., plain or peanut M&Ms), and every member of the group counts the pieces in her packet (the total, as well as each color). The students are motivated to analyze the resulting dataset, and their intuition is called upon to illustrate key concepts in ANOVA, such as sample size, statistically significant group differences, and multiple comparisons. Strategic choices of candy varieties can lead to different configurations of statistical findings.