AP Stats sampling vocab

Want to watch an ap stats classes eyes glaze over? Start talking to them about stratified vs. cluster vs simple random sample vs judgement sampling.

 photo via

Really. Pull the powerpoint from the book, throw it on the screen, and watch the light dim from their eyes.

I didn’t do that. …. This year. I didn’t do it last year either, but I was not totally successful in this endeavor. Last year I did some activities AND showed the powerpoint. Not this year at all.

Last week on Thursday and Friday I showed the powerpoint I created that had the theory, the background and the why we are learning the vocab, then they looked up the words themselves.

Today we did the Jelly Blubbers activity. Jelly Blubbers teacher handout and the Learner Notes and a   stratified blubber page I don’t hand out.

   

It drove the point home that judgment sampling is wrong because it creates bias, and that for certain things, stratified is terrific! We had a short discussion of why we need different ways to do the sampling, and what benefits are achieved by sampling.

This was the progression and order we did it in. The bias in the judgement sample is clear. They really liked the larger blubbers over the smaller ones.

All in all, it was a great day in AP Stats.

Algebra 2 was more … difficult.

There is a lot of vocab to go through, ie. Domain, Range, function notation, set notation and interval notation, etc etc etc.

We spent the entire period learning those. I really feel like it was not successful, HOWEVER, they were involved and active in the discussion about what the different ways of representing domain, range and the other ideas were. I think they learned useful things today, it just was not as an active day as I would want.

I will work on that tomorrow.