Contributed paper list


   (Thursday 17th, 13:45-15:15)   In session C13A

Fostering changes in confidence intervals interpretation

Authors

Luisa Andrade, Felipe Fernández, Ingrith Álvarez Alfonso

Presenter

Ingrith Álvarez Alfonso (Colombia)

Abstract

As literature has reported, it is usual that university students in statistics courses and even statistics teachers interpret the confidence level associated with a confidence interval as the probability that the parameter value will be between the lower and upper interval limits. To confront this misconception, a class activity has been designed with the aim to realize that this application of confidence level explicitly violates the basic laws of probability. We consider two non-overlapping confidence intervals, that could plausibly correspond to two random samples from the same population, where the probability of events within this interpretation contradicts the probability rule for disjoint events and the rule of monotonicity (P[E] ≤ P[F] if E ⊆ F). We use simulation to help students shift to a frequentist interpretation of confidence intervals.