Navigation: CAUSEweb -> Webinars -> Activity Series -> October 2009
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| Activity Webinar Series |
"Taking your Class for a Walk ... Randomly"
with Daniel Kaplan, Macalester College
2:30 to 3:00 pm Eastern time, October 27th, 2009
An important idea in statistics is that the amount of data matters. We often teach this with formulas --- the standard error of the mean, the t-statistic, etc. --- in which the sample size appears in a denominator as √n. This is fine, so far as it goes, but it often fails to connect with a student's intuition. In this presentation, I'll describe a kinesthetic learning activity --- literally a random walk --- that helps drive home to students why more data is better and why the square-root arises naturally and can be understood by simple geometry. Students remember this activity and its lesson long after they have forgotten the formulas from their statistics class.
Download Presentation (PDF)
Download Handouts (ZIP archive)