In this activity students will be investigating with normal body temperature is actually 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. Yesterday the students put together all of the pieces that they would need in order to conduct a significance test for means. For today's lesson, we are focusing a lot more on how the students are writing their work and reviewing the connections that confidence intervals have with significance tests. 

One-Sided or Two-Sided?

We really want the students to think through the context of whatever situation they are in. For example, this activity specifically asks them if normal body temperature is actually 98.6. That means all we are looking to show is that it is "not" 98.6. This will lead us to conducting a two-sided test as opposed to a one sided test. 

Ask your students what the question would look like it was a one-sided test. We should be able to come up with rephrasing such as "is normal body temperature actually higher than 98.6?". Make sure they can identify the differences between one-sided and two-sided tests. 

Confidence Interval or Significance Test?

A two-sided test will give us the exact same result as a confidence interval. During this part of the activity, we like to ask the students why we may actually prefer the confidence interval over a significance test. Since they each answer the question the same, the benefit that we want the students to realize is that the confidence interval also gives us a range of possible values. 

Teaching Tip

When discussing the confidence interval / significance test connection go back to the picture you drew in the significance test and shade the region the confidence interval is talking about. This will help the students visualize how these two things are connected to one another.