Confidence Intervals in a High School Statistics Class

Abstract

In order to be a functioning member of society, it is important that a citizen understands basic statistics. One key topic in particular is confidence intervals. There are confidence intervals in everyday life, no matter if you are a person in college or just a person in society. Many claims about population rely on a sample and the statistics of confidence intervals. For example: We believe, with 95% confidence, that 40% ± 3% of Americans will approve a new law by Congress, meaning that we are 95% confident that any sample formed in this way will have a proportion or mean that falls in the confidence interval. For my thesis project, I created a lesson that can be used to help teach high school students to understand what a confidence interval is and how to use it. This lesson uses multiple strategies to help students understand how to create and interpret a confidence interval. The lesson also follows the Common Core State Standards for statistics that relate to confidence intervals. The hope is that by informing high school students about how to interpret and use a confidence interval, they will be able to understand the statistics they will encounter on a regular basis.