Teaching Statistics Using Political Polls

• Activity Number: 177
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Monday, August 4, 2014 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistical Education
• Author(s): T. Ceesay*+
• Companies: Merck
• Keywords: teaching ; political polls ; statistical thinking

Abstract

Society is continuously bombarded with information from various types of polls. In particular, political polls measure everything from the pulse of the constituents on a particular issue to the prediction of the outcome of presidential elections. Recently, a lot of emphasis has been placed on teaching students statistical concepts and how to apply them to the understanding of real situations instead of regurgitating and manipulating statistical methods. This is a particularly valuable approach for teaching statistics to students in non-quantitative majors such as horticulture and journalism. Some students may suffer from mathematics anxiety. Evaluating political polls is an ideal medium to accomplish this task especially if it is used during an election year because the students can see the applications in real time. The use of statistical thinking concepts to help students critically analyze political polls will be discussed as well as the challenges of teaching statistics deemphasizing quantitative methods.