AIMS Materials: Samples and Sampling
Introduction to the Lessons
Building on the basic idea of a sample, these lessons provide students with experience across different contexts with how samples vary and the factors that affect this variability. This leads to the idea of accumulating and graphing multiple samples from the same population (of a given sample size), which leads to the more abstract idea of a sampling distribution. Different empirical sampling distributions are generated and observed, to see the predictable pattern that is a consequence of the Central Limit Theorem (CLT). Finally, students use the CLT to solve problems involving the likelihood of different values of sample means. Believing that it is more intuitively accessible to students, we begin the study of sampling with proportions and then move to sample means.
Samples and Sampling Materials
The AIMS materials for the topic of samples and sampling include several different zipped folders. Each folder contains the relevant materials for this topic. There is also a PDF file of the topic's sequence of ideas and associated activities. All materials can be accessed by selecting the icon to the right of the file description.
