Overall Notes

• There is one version of this assessment provided in the Teacher Resources Materials (TRM). Use this assessment as-is or use it as a model to create your own. 

• If you are making your own assessment, consider using the test bank and the ExamView software.

• We suggest you allow students access to the Traditional Inference applets at www.statsmedic.com/applets for this quiz. 

• Consider allowing students to use the four-step template for confidence intervals and the four-step template for significance tests (with no work needed in the DO: step if they are using the applets).

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Common Student Errors

• Student often incorrectly use "difference of the means" when defining the parameter. The correct parameter here is the "mean of the differences".

• Students often forget to indicate the order of subtraction when they are defining a parameter. 

• Students will sometimes skip parts of the 4-step process. Insist that they show every part of the 4-step process.

• For the Normal/Large Sample condition, be sure that students are precise in their vocabulary. "the problem says it is normal" is not enough. We are looking for "the problem says that the population distribution is normal".

• For the Normal/Large Sample condition, be sure that students clearly identify the sample size and compare it to 30. 

• When checking the Normal/Large Sample condition for the case of small sample size and no knowledge of the population distribution, students should include a sketch of a graph for the sample data.

• When writing hypotheses for a significance test, students will sometimes incorrectly use notation that refers to a statistic from the sample. Hypotheses should always be written with parameters.

• Students sometimes struggle to identify when an alternative hypothesis is one-sided or two-sided. Encourage them to use clues from the wording of the question.

• Students will often forget to include context when writing a conclusion for a significance test. 

• Students will sometimes incorrectly "accept the null", when they should be "failing to reject the null".

• When rejecting the null hypothesis, students will say that we have "proved" the alternative hypothesis is true. We don't know for sure that the alternative is true (we could be making a Type I error), so students should be saying there is "convincing evidence for the alternative hypothesis".