Activity 7 confidence

It's very easy for the students to work through this activity without gaining the insights that we seem to want them to gain.

Almost all of Exercise 4 on D2L is about vocabulary, which is hard to stress in activity based learning. Even if the kids think they are learning because they are doing all the problems, it's unlikely they will pick up on the vocabulary, especially since confidence is a concept that needs to be defined very precisely.

Now knowing how the students will be evaluated, I wish I would have spent a chunk of time lecturing before the activity.

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Hmm, I'm trying out this wiki now, and I don't see how Michael's comments above will show as separate form comments I will add below. (Jim Robison-Cox)
It is tough to get the right balance between lecture and group work. This activity just got added this summer, and certainly needs editing. I want to make the difference more clear between numbers 2-8 which use the confidence demo web app (simulates new samples based on known p) and the other parts of the activity. In # 9 we go back to analyzing data, so there should be a more obvious break.

But back to the bigger issue: In the past we have shown a picture of 100 CI's based on a simulation, and waved our hands about "long run coverage". StatKey was an improvement because we could create plots of 100 or more simulated CI's, clear them and run it again. That allows them to see that 95% does not mean exactly 95 out of each 100. I've usually resorted to telling students: here's the recipe for what to write when we ask what "confidence" means. And I did do that this week, as well. We certainly need to - and I'll try to make sure we do -- come back to this concept again and again.

Another point from last year might be useful: in evaluations the TEAL students very often requested more lecture, and I think that lecture has its place. The activities attempt to get students to build the concepts for themselves (with some guidance) - a "constructivist" approach. If they can do that, chance are far greater that they will retain the concepts for much longer. Lecture is also needed to keep them on the right track.

Assessment/Evaluation is another tough issue. I think we too often resort to asking questions that are based on rote memorization. We should be trying to develop higher level skills like comparison and synthesis.

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I'm now thinking that the wiki platform is not well suited to a discussion. I'm going to look into google groups forum instead. J R-C.