Teaching population and sample size to your students can be a daunting task. It is important for high school teachers to know how population and sample size are taught to have the most effective lesson possible. Find out how you teach your high students population and sample size from beginning to end with ease!
Use Easy Examples
Understanding statistics might be hard for your students in the first instance. It falls on you to make population and sample size fun, exciting, and easy to grasp. This will not be an easy task for you, but it can definitely be done! You can teach population and sample size using examples the students would relate to in real life.
For example, population could mean all of the learners at your high school or across America that go out to have fun on Friday night after a big game win.
Sample sizes might include just 25% of those hundreds of students who drink alcohol because they’re underage. Using these types of simple comparisons really helps cement population and sample size into memory so much easier than if you were trying to teach them without any connections made between statistics concepts with real-life examples.
Do A Class Survey With Students Representing Different Population Types
Secondly, you could ask your students to represent population types in a series of class surveys. For example, you might ask the entire population (all high school students) whether they think that smoking marijuana is okay or not while taking into account different factors like their gender and socioeconomic status. This would give you an accurate idea about what all of America believes on this subject – 100% accuracy!
This activity really helps make population and sample size easy to understand for your students because it’s no longer theoretical. It becomes real, bringing the aspect of statistics alive. Students will also see how population and sample size work together when asking questions related to population before drawing conclusions from smaller samples.
Doing both activities at once can be confusing, so take one step at a time – population first, then sample size.
After They’ve Modeled Population Sizes, Teach Margin Of Error
Lastly, remember to teach them about the margin of error. Here, you will teach population and sample size together to understand better how the two concepts relate. It’s vital for them to realize that if population sizes are large enough, the margin of error becomes small because there will always be outliers in every population, no matter how big or small it may seem at first sight.
When you teach population and sample size simultaneously, students understand why scientists use representative samples when making claims about entire countries, states/provinces, even the world. That way, they will understand population and sample size just like scientists who rely on these statistics all the time do.
With these tips, you can guide your class to understand populations and sample sizes successfully. Good luck with your teaching!
