Contributed Paper C251
In session C7H (Wednesday 11th, 9:30-10:30, Level 3 - Conference Room B)Significance of intuitive explanation of CI for non-statistician students
Authors
Yelena Stukalin (The Academic College of Tel Aviv Yaffo, Israel)Sigal Levy (The Academic College of Tel Aviv Yaffo, Israel)
Presenter
Yelena Stukalin (Israel)Abstract
Confidence interval is one of the most important concepts in statistical inference. However, its meaning is hard to understand and it is a challenge to teach this concept to non-statistician students.
In our experiment we compared two methods of introducing confidence intervals to students. We compare two groups of students. The first group of students was taught by providing an intuitive explanation of the concept by showing a simulation. The second group received a mathematical explanation of the formula. Following that, both groups answered a multiple-choice question.
We found that the first group of students showed better understanding than the second one. The conclusion is that an intuitive and graphical explanation is superior to a mathematical one in understanding the complex concept of confidence interval.