Sampling Distributions can be a bit tricky for students to truly understand and a strong introduction is needed to help ease confusion from the beginning. In the past, I have tried many different activities, but I have finally found the one. Yes, The One. Students were even thanking me as they left the class on a job well-done.
A spreadsheet with the 2016 MLB Players' Salaries was shared with me by a dear colleague a couple of months ago. Unfortunately, I have already forgotten who it was. Too bad, because I'd really love to give him (I know that much) props as the sheet is setup beautifully! Create a copy here.
Here's how it went down...
I sent a force-copy of the 2016 MLB Salary sheet to my students via email. Once everyone had it open, we began choosing random numbers from 1-862 (the number of baseball players). The first set had n = 2, so each student chose 2 players at random. The beauty is, they only had to type in the random numbers, the sheet was set up to populate the cells with the players' names, salary, and the mean of those salaries. We did three sample sizes with the addition of n = 10 and n = 30.
Once each student had the means for the three different samples, we discussed what was happening; what was the influence of the sample sizes on the means. And then we backed up our thoughts with statistics! I had the students enter their means in the appropriate cells on this spreadsheet, which I kept as a live document projected on the classroom screen. To avoid confusion, I had the kiddos only put values into the row of their assigned classroom number. This way, they weren't overriding each other's input.
After all students had put in their three means, I had them make a copy of the spreadsheet so they could edit individually. The expectation was to copy/paste the means from each n into the appropriate tab/sheet and create histograms. Of course, we discussed what happened to the center, shape, and spread as n increased.
What a great learning experience for all of us!
~ssb
A spreadsheet with the 2016 MLB Players' Salaries was shared with me by a dear colleague a couple of months ago. Unfortunately, I have already forgotten who it was. Too bad, because I'd really love to give him (I know that much) props as the sheet is setup beautifully! Create a copy here.
Here's how it went down...
I sent a force-copy of the 2016 MLB Salary sheet to my students via email. Once everyone had it open, we began choosing random numbers from 1-862 (the number of baseball players). The first set had n = 2, so each student chose 2 players at random. The beauty is, they only had to type in the random numbers, the sheet was set up to populate the cells with the players' names, salary, and the mean of those salaries. We did three sample sizes with the addition of n = 10 and n = 30.
Once each student had the means for the three different samples, we discussed what was happening; what was the influence of the sample sizes on the means. And then we backed up our thoughts with statistics! I had the students enter their means in the appropriate cells on this spreadsheet, which I kept as a live document projected on the classroom screen. To avoid confusion, I had the kiddos only put values into the row of their assigned classroom number. This way, they weren't overriding each other's input.After all students had put in their three means, I had them make a copy of the spreadsheet so they could edit individually. The expectation was to copy/paste the means from each n into the appropriate tab/sheet and create histograms. Of course, we discussed what happened to the center, shape, and spread as n increased.
What a great learning experience for all of us!
~ssb
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