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Instructors' Guide for Facilitating
Activity
Activity Distance: How Far are You Away From
Home?
Required Equipment
• Computers for each student to
conduct the online data collection
• A pass code for this Activity (If you do not have this,
please register
for a pass
code.)
Activity
This activity is designed to help students learn the
importance of proper measurement, concepts of central
tendency, variability, and learning the
different shapes of distributions in statistics. The
data can be used for inference, analysis of variance and
categorical analysis.
Suggested Approach and Some Tips for
Facilitating This Activity
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1. |
Describe
this activity as a scenario.
For example:
The Admission Office of this university is
considering revising the policy of recruiting students. As the first
step in this process, the university wishes to find out how far and
where students are coming from and reasons for choosing this university. You are assigned this project to
assist the university in collecting data, analyzing it, and making
a report of your findings.
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2. |
Engage
students in the data measurement and data collection
stage.
• Ask some students how far they are from home.
Anticipate that students may answer in
"number of hours",
in "miles", "just in town", etc.
Engage students to discuss
the pros and cons of each type of
measurement.
• It is a good idea also to toss out the measurement of
"kilometer" and discuss the use of the
measurement
sometimes depends on the culture.
• It is a good idea to give some cases where the
mistake in
measurement can have a serious consequence.
One such
example is the ignorance of changing the
measurement
unit from "centimeter" to "inches" for a
measurement
used in the space rover that was sent to Mars in
2001
and led to a loss of over one billion dollars.
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3. |
Choose to
participate in the activity or use the data collected
by other classes. If you only want to use the data
collected by other classes, you may go to step 4.
Otherwise, direct students to the
Data Entry page for
conducting the online survey.
• Before allowing students to enter their data, you
should
already have the "Activity Code". If
not, please refer to
the
Registration page.
• Provide the Activity Code to your class and have
students
enter their data. Please stress that
each student can only
enter the data once. Therefore, ask
them to double check
their data before submission.
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4. |
Direct
students to the Data Download page. Direct
students to follow your instruction to download the
data. As described on the page, you have different
choices for downloading the data. Please be
specific so that your class will obtain the same data
set.
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5. |
Direct
students to analyze the data.
You should have chosen what statistical tool your class
will be using for analyzing the data.
• You may use the software your local computer lab has.
• You may use the online software, "Crunch_It"
at
http://www.statcrunch.com/. For first time
users, you
need to sign on to the
site. Please
stress that students need to remember their
own ID and
password. Direct students to input
the data and analyze
the data. Be more focused on what
tools are to be used
for analyzing this distance data based on
the purpose of
this activity.
Suggested
Questions for Classroom Activities
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6. |
Facilitate
the discussion of the results.
• Facilitating the discussion of the results should
focus on
the related context, not just the numbers
themselves.
• This activity also is an excellent way to familiarize
students with the different types of
distributions. The
different types of distributions include
normal, skewed to
the left, and skewed to the right.
• The discussion should stress the relationship between
different graphical presentations and
numerical
measurements in different real world
contexts, not just this
distance data.
Some examples include:
(1) Mean > Median does not imply
the shape of
distribution must be skewed to
the right. One has to
take into account the
magnitude of standard
deviation. Suppose 100 gas
prices are observed.
The average gas price = $1.68 and median gas price
=$1.66, sample standard deviation is $0.20.
Have students discuss the most likely
distribution
shape of the gas prices.
(2) If the standard deviation of
the entire class of 40
students is zero,
what would you observe from the
40 scores?
(3) Matching the histograms
with box plots.
(4) Matching numerical measures
with graphs.
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7. |
Assessment:
Online Self-Test for Students
Suggested Questions for
Classroom Activities
Suggested Questions for Homework and Projects |
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