Practical activities

High-speed hypotheses!
Lawrence M. Lesser
The University of Texas at El Paso, Texas, USA. e-mail: lesser@utep.edu

Abstract

This article presents engaging interactive hypothesis tests which can be conducted with students very efciently. Teaching; Hypothesis tests; P-value.

Keywords:

Introduction
With class time at a premium, it helps to have handy a repertoire of engaging classroom-tested activities or experiments that can each be done within 5 minutes from collection of data to computation of the p-value! Such activities support the American Statistical Associations (ASA; 2010) recommendations to use real data and foster active learning in the classroom, illustrate the statistical problem solving process (ASA 2007) and likely tap the potential benets of using fun in the statistics classroom (Lesser and Pearl 2008). A representative variety of common basic hypothesis tests are spanned with the activities which follow.

Activity one: who has ESP?

Background: Because it is discussed in popular culture, students are already familiar with and interested in the idea of having extra-sensory perception (ESP). Some textbooks (e.g. Utts 2005) have used it in case study examples. ESP experiments commonly involve predictions from a smaller set of items (with maybe 4 or 5 choices), but this can be modied for pedagogical purposes, as it is here. Topic: (One-tailed) hypothesis test for a proportion p Procedure: You bring in a standard 52-card deck of cards (make sure students are familiar with the breakdown of suits and values on the cards) and have students commit in writing their predictions for, say, a dozen cards about to be drawn with replacement. Under the null hypothesis of no ESP, the probability of a correct prediction (i.e. of both suit and denomination) would be 1/52, or about 1.9%. While you draw the cards, every student in the room
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is participating by independently trying to make a correct prediction. Because almost all students will experience no more than two successes, it is very quick to tabulate the results of the hypothesis test for these cases. When asked in advance Do any of you have ESP?, no student seriously answers Yes, so it can be noted that by chance alone, a sufciently large class can be expected to have at least one student who obtains a personal p-value of less than 5%, therefore falsely rejecting the null hypothesis. Teachers interested in adding a magic trick component (e.g. using marked cards) can ensure obtaining a signicant p-value by being (almost surely) the only one in the room to make all predictions correctly or (to make it not quite so suspicious) even to make most of the predictions correctly (by deliberately missing a few). Lesser and Glickman (2009) offer related discussion on the use of magic in statistics. Teachers wanting to vary the success probabilities involved could have students predict only the suit or only the denomination. A website students can use to further explore and assess their psychic abilities (to predict cards, pictures, locations, lottery numbers, etc.) is http://www.gotpsi.org.

Activity two: take your seats

Background: There is some literature about where students prefer to sit in various types of classrooms (e.g. Kaya and Burgess 2007) and gender is a variable that is considered of potential importance in this context. For this activity, we assume that the classroom seating arrangement is a rectangle made up of rows of individual seats, but modications can be made for other arrangements.
2011 The Author Teaching Statistics 2011 Teaching Statistics Trust, 34, 1, pp 1012

High-speed hypotheses!

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Topic: Test of the equality of two proportions (or done as a chi-squared test of independence) Procedure: Walk into the classroom where students have already freely chosen their seats. Have the class agree on an operational denition of front half of the room and back half of the room, for the part of the room where students are sitting. The class can ll in the table below in less than 1 minute and then go on to test the null hypothesis that males and females are equally likely to sit in the front half of the room. The teacher could have students identify the two populations in this activity and then discuss whether or not the males and females in the room can be considered as random samples from those respective populations.

Number of males Front half of the classroom Back half of the classroom

Number of females

Activity three: hold a note

Background: Some published literature (e.g. Cheng 1991) suggests that you can sing more fully in a standing position than in a sitting position, while other literature suggests that the more important consideration is simply good posture whether you are sitting or standing. Topic: Testing the equality of two means Procedure: Each student ips a coin to determine whether he/she will be in the sitting (tails) or standing (heads) group. An online stopwatch (e.g. http://www.shodor.org/ interactivate/activities/Stopwatch/) is projected onto a screen where it is within view of everyone. After a 3-2-1 countdown by the teacher, the stopwatch will be started and everyone in the room will start to sing a note. (For consistency, suggest that everyone use a common syllable such as ohhhhhhh; also suggest to everyone to choose a pitch in the middle of their singing range, which should be easier to maintain for the duration of their singing). Each student is asked to watch the stopwatch and notice the amount of elapsed time at the instant he/she ran out of air and was unable to continue singing. Almost everyone will be done after about 18 seconds, so the total time needed is very minimal. The teacher now displays a spreadsheet or software package for data analysis. The data can be
2011 The Author Teaching Statistics 2011 Teaching Statistics Trust, 34, 1, pp 1012

entered either by having students one at a time call out their time (and whether they were sitting or standing) or, in case more privacy is desired, by having students ll out and turn in a simple slip of paper without their name on it that indicates the time duration (in seconds) and whether they were sitting or standing. To perform the test of means of the two independent samples, students will need to agree on whether to have the software do a t test or a z test, and whether to assume the unknown variances are equal. Beyond the calculations, students can also be asked to do the following: (1) discuss whether this experiment is best classied as single-blind, double-blind or neither; (2) discuss what would be changed to have each person try both the sitting and the standing conditions; (3) consider a third condition (e.g. singing with arms held straight up towards the ceiling, or maybe singing right after doing 20 jumping jacks) which would make this activity a vehicle to test the equality of more than two means (i.e. to use analysis of variance). Even though singing can be a personal form of expression, the beauty of this activity is that it simply is a single note (so that the ability to keep rhythmic time, for example, is not needed) and that everyone is doing it at the same time and so no one will be able to easily hear anyone (or hear when they drop out) except for the very last couple of people, and by that naked end of the window, students have already moved beyond any initial moment of self-consciousness. To make the activity feel safe and fun, I demonstrate the procedure by holding a note all by myself rst while I run the stopwatch, then I point out that each voice will be camouaged by doing it all together, and I also mention that anyone who feels uncomfortable for any reason is not required to participate. To the extent that humming may feel safer than singing, this activity works just as well having each student humming (with closed lips, mmmmmm). In several implementations of this activity, I have not noticed any students reticence or nonparticipation. If anything, there seems to be a positive communal experience about doing something this unusual in statistics class in general, as well as the particular pleasantness of being enveloped by the sound vibrations of everyones simultaneous notes and how they collectively and spontaneously formed interesting harmonies.

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Lawrence M. Lesser

Activity four: which hand is quicker?

Background: Anderson-Cook and Sundar (2001) describe a class demonstration to compare the reaction times of ones dominant and nondominant hands. In the demonstration, there is a 3-2-1 countdown and then one of nine boxes lights up and the time (to the hundredths of a second) is recorded for how long it takes to move the computer mouse (with a designated hand) over to that highlighted box and click on it. As time permits before the demonstration, teachers can rst discuss the principles of experimental design and critique the awed rst draft of the experimental design offered in that article. If time is limited, however, teachers can just go to and use the nal version of the applet at http://www.amstat.org/publications/ jse / java / v9n1 / anderson-cook / GoodExpDesign Applet.html. Topic: Test of means from two dependent samples Procedure: Teacher projects onto a screen the website at the URL just mentioned and personally takes the test with each hand to demonstrate to the class how the applet works, explaining what dominant and non-dominant mean and how the trafc light countdown graphic and Reset! and Start! buttons work. Then, a reasonable number of students (as few as 5 or 6 is sufcient to illustrate the concept, but more can be allowed if there is time and interest) each come up one at a time to try the applet. Each data observation takes just a second (literally), so the entire data collection can go very quickly. Then the Compile Info! button can be hit to reveal the t value of the paired t test.

References
American Statistical Association (2007). Guidelines for Assessment and Instruction in Statistics Education (GAISE) Report: A Pre-K-12 Curriculum Framework. Alexandria, VA: American Statistical Association. http:// www.amstat.org/education/gaise/. American Statistical Association (2010). Guidelines for Assessment and Instruction in Statistics Education: College Report. Alexandria, VA: American Statistical Association. http:// www.amstat.org/education/gaise/. Anderson-Cook, C.M. and Sundar, D.-R. (2001). An active learning in-class demonstration of good experimental design. Journal of Statistics Education, 9(1), http://www.amstat.org/ publications/jse/v9n1/anderson-cook.html. Cheng, S.C.-T. (1991). The Tao of Voice: A New East-West Approach to Transforming the Singing and Speaking Voice. Rochester, VT: Destiny Books. Kaya, N. and Burgess, B. (2007). Territoriality: Seat preferences in different types of classroom arrangements. Environment and Behavior, 39(6), 859876. Lesser, L.M. and Glickman, M. E. (2009). Using magic in the teaching of probability and statistics. Model Assisted Statistics and Applications, 4(4), 265274. Lesser, L.M. and Pearl, D.K. (2008). Functional fun in statistics teaching: Resources, research, and recommendations. Journal of Statistics Education, 16(3), 111. http://www.amstat. org/publications/jse/v16n3/lesser.pdf. Utts, J.M. (2005). Seeing Through Statistics (3rd edn). Belmont, CA: Thomson Brooks/Cole.

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