Teach 180: A Little Competition Can Be a Good Thing (Day 42)

Today was our first day in Probability and Statistics for analyzing bivariate data.  One of the concepts that students sometime struggle with is estimating the strength of a linear relationship from a scatterplot.  They think there is no association when there is a weak, negative linear association.  Or they think there is a strong, positive linear association when it is more of a moderate, positive linear association.

Today, we used the Rossman-Chance applet called Guess the Correlation to improve our estimation skills with correlation.  Student were arranged in a bracket-style competition.  Each student was shown a randomly produced scatterplot with 25 dots and the student had to guess the correlation coefficient.  The student in the pair that was closest to the correct value moved on to the next round of competition.  An example is shown below.  You can see that I did fairly well. But not as well as the winner of the tournament, who was within 0.005 with his estimate!