Statistics in Your World - Level 2

This resource from the Royal Statistical Society Centre for Statistical Education (RSSCSE) consists of the level 2 units. For each unit below there are comprehensive teachers' notes giving an overview of the unit, the aims and objectives for that unit, and prior learning or prerequisites and the equipment required.

• Seeing Is Believing: Students' reactions to a number of optical illusions give a rough measure of the power of each illusion using ordinal scales. Three of the illusions are followed up in detail. On completion of this unit students should be able to calculate a mode for discrete ordinal and discrete interval data.
• Authors Anonymous: The unit encourages students to look for patterns in word length, sentence length, and summary statistics among different passages from the same author and between different authors. On completion of the unit students should have an appreciation of how the summary statistics can be used in inference, in particular as clues to authorship.
• On The Ball: This unit looks at the results and goals scored in English league football. The number of goals scored today are compared to the number scored 20 years ago. On completion of this unit students should be able to use known relative frequencies to estimate probabilities and to use probabilities in predicting future events.
• Fair Play: Students are encouraged to design stalls for a summer fair. The stalls are analysed probabilistically to help decide on entry fees and prizes which will maximize profits. On completion of the unit students should be able to use relative frequencies from experimental results and also to assign and use probabilities from expected results in simple equally likely cases.
• Opinion Matters: This unit is concerned with questionnaire design. A first attempt at devising a questionnaire on school rules and punishments is reconsidered after work on fact finding and opinion polls. Through using poor questionnaires and examining what has gone wrong students see the importance of questionnaire design for obtaining information.
• Getting It Right: This unit discusses appropriate levels of accuracy in various contexts. It distinguishes between variation from human error and bias from faulty instruments. It shows that using the mean reduces variation and demonstrates how to spot bias. Finally it discusses sensible answers in conversions and calculations.

• Statistics in Your World - Level 2 Interactive Resource