As of now, I have written 3 AP Statistics review activities centered around candy. You can access them all by clicking here. They are taking us around 2 class periods each, which is a full 160 minutes of class time; not a short commitment by any means, but I’m enjoying the long game connections a LOT.
Here’s a summary of topics I’ve covered so far:
Activity 1 – Skittles
This activity works itself up to chi-square goodness of fit tests (which, when I gave out this activity, we had not actually covered). Along the way we covered:
- relative frequency tables
- sample design, including
- voluntary response sample
- convenience sample
- simple random sample
- cluster sampling
- stratified sampling
- multistage sampling
- collecting a sample and creating frequency and relative frequency tables
- displaying categorical data with pie charts and bar graphs
- two-way tables
- marginal and conditional distributions
- sampling distribution of sample proportions
- confidence intervals for population proportions
- 1 proportion z tests
- Chi-square GOF tests
Activity 2 – Starbursts
This activity centered around a claim that the proportion of orange Starbursts is the same as the the proportion of orange skittles. We had never done 2-proportion z-tests, so the activity spends a lot of time walking through the logic of them and reviewing symbols and their meaning.
- power of a test
- calculating power (as an exercise in reviewing tests and CIs)
- 1-proportion z tests (again)
- 2-proportion z-tests
Activity 3 – M&Ms
In this one, we introduce quantitative data by measuring the mass of the M&Ms, while also reviewing some categorical data.
- gathering data
- review chi-square GOF with several possible distributions and sample sizes (exploring power, etc, along the way)
- check percentage of actual rejected hypotheses against alpha
- represent quantitative data visually and use SOCS
- confidence interval for sample means
- effect of sample size and alpha on power
- 2-sample mean t-test
I honestly don’t know if this sort of long-range, vertical review is better than more traditional review or learning, but the students seem more engaged then I was getting them before, and I think they are grasping some of the big-picture conceptual things better than before, at least, which is satisfying for all of us. No idea if it will translate to AP scores.