Prob and Stats Course: Advantages and Disadvantage

Easily the biggest challenge in this course the nature of the math, it is a different math course - a focus on analysis, which is open-ended. Students associate math with solving to get a single answer (sadly, this is true for linear functions).

What is great about statistics is that the real life applications are immediate and relevant. Following is a list:

• Line graphs: minimum wage in CT
• Dot plot: graph of cell phone prices for Verizon
• Histogram: graph of car prices for used Camrys
• Mean and median: cell phone prices - great to address outliers as shown in methods
• box plots (parallel): compare rents for apartments in New York vs Hartford
• scatterplot: used car prices and mileage
• correlation and regression: used car prices and mileage
• probability: lottery, determining car insurance premiums, determining how many passengers to book for a flight
• Two way tables and conditional probability: gender and t-shirt size
• inference: estimate mean height of all students at school using a sample mean

What I particularly like is the fact that most colleges and many or even most majors either require or recommend a stats course. I share this with seniors by explaining how the degree requirements work at a college. This gets their interest. The fact they need stats also gets their attention. Many of you can probably share where you saw stats used in your profession.

Here are links to a survey and data from the survey I used with my classes a couple years ago. You can easily use this in your classes. I used the data for many, even most of the topics listed above. E.g. height and shoe size for scatter plots (shoe size is not on this survey but I added it in a subsequent survey). The kids find the data interesting and intuitively understand it.