Thoughts on Teaching Week 3 tutorial
At present, exams are online. This means that the need for students to use a calculator is diminished; they can use whatever they want (e.g., spreadsheet or jamovi) I guess. We have no way of knowing anyway.
For that reason, you may wish to reconsider how this is taught. Nonetheless, I think that learning to use a calculator for simple calculation is a useful skill. Using the Stats mode can also be useful.
There will be a question in the exam where studets are expected to compute a mean and/or standard deviation, so finding a quick way (i.e., not by hand) is important. Students could use as jamovi or the Stats mode on a calculator, for example.Thoughts on Sect. 3.2
You may like to suggest that students search on YouTube for some tutorials on using their calculator's Statistics Mode.
The Course Outline indicates that a calculator is needed. Help students as much as you can, but you cannot be expected to know how to work every type of calculator that is out there. You can perhaps direct students to work with other students having similar calculators.
If students use the wrong standard deviation button, they will get σ=s=1485.919327 tonnes in error. This is one important outcome of this question: that students know what button to press on their calculator to get the sample standard deviation.Thoughts on Sect. 3.3
You can have groups answer each part separately, then share their explanations with the class. You may wish to quiz the students about means and IQRs too.
For your info only (note the means and medians are very similar), see Table D.1.| A | B | C | D | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Std devs | 7.04 | 5.90 | 5.10 | 2.84 |
| IQRs | 12.10 | 7.96 | 5.82 | 4.71 |
| Medians | 27.13 | 25.19 | 20.07 | 45.03 |
| Means | 27.15 | 25.26 | 21.49 | 44.95 |
Thoughts on Sect. 3.5
Following on from the ruler-drop planning activity from Week 2 (Sect. 2.5): use the protocol established then, and have students actually collect data.
I suggest starting jamovi.
(Remember: each unit of analysis (student) is a row; the columns will be Dom and NonDom hand timings),
Show students how to set up the variables, and have them come to the computer and enter their own data.
Then compute the differences (automatically; see me if unsure), and then show them how to produce an appropriate graph (e.g., histogram of differences) and some numerical summary information.
Save the data!