Statistical Simulation – The Effect of the Treatment on Sample Means

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More than any other topic, I was most worried about writing lessons for the statistics standards in Common Core Algebra II. I’ve been a high school math teacher in New York now for 16 years. The extent I’ve taught stat has been the normal distribution in half-standard deviation increments (all you Integrated Course III teachers know what I’m saying). I taught college statistics over a decade ago at Syracuse University, but it’s been awhile.

So the prospect of somehow trying to tackle a standard like:

S-IC.5: Use data from a randomized experiment to compare two treatments; use simulations to decide if differences between parameters are significant.

Whew! Right?

Well, these have been some of my very favorite lessons to write. That’s mostly because I’ve gotten to do math and understand math better than before. And that’s been thrilling.

Here’s the lesson and homework set that I just created to address this standard. In order to run do the lesson, you MUST download and install the TI83/84 program MEANCOMP. Place data in L1 and L2 and the program will do amazing simulations!

Unit #13.Lesson #7.The Difference in Sample Means

MEANCOMP

DISTRIBUTION OF SAMPLE MEAN DIFFS

When the simulation is over it is good to SortA (sort ascending) your results that are in L3. In a newer version of the program I will be posting, this is done automatically.