Open AccessCONCEPTUAL ISSUES IN QUANTIFYING UNUSUALNESS AND CONCEIVING STOCHASTIC EXPERIMENTS: INSIGHTS FROM STUDENTS’ EXPERIENCES IN DESIGNING SAMPLING SIMULATIONS
Author(s) -
Luis Saldanha
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
statistics education research journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 1570-1824
DOI - 10.52041/serj.v15i2.242
Subject(s) - sampling (signal processing) , mathematics education , outcome (game theory) , sample (material) , population , probabilistic logic , sample size determination , computer science , psychology , statistics , artificial intelligence , mathematics , sociology , chemistry , demography , mathematical economics , filter (signal processing) , chromatography , computer vision
This article reports on a classroom teaching experiment that engaged a group of high school students in designing sampling simulations within a computer microworld. The simulation-design activities aimed to foster students’ abilities to conceive of contextual situations as stochastic experiments, and to engage them with the logic of hypothesis testing. This scheme of ideas involves imagining a population and a sample drawn from it, and an image of repeated sampling as a basis for quantifying a sampling outcome’s unusualness in terms of long-run relative frequency under an assumption about the population’s composition. The study highlights challenges that students experienced, and sheds light on aspects of conceiving stochastic experiments and conceiving a sampling outcome’s unusualness as a probabilistic quantity.First published November 2016 at Statistics Education Research Journal Archives