From Maura:

I subbed for Ethan today.  We spent a fair amount of time on course evaluations, including the attitudinal survey that we had done at the beginning of the semester.  As part of the assessment outlined in our National Science Foundation grant, we are asking students about their attitudes to quantitative reasoning (and math) at the beginning of the semester and again at the end.  We hope this approach makes a difference. It’s difficult to measure this, however, and this survey is only a small piece of information.

We reviewed some of the homework problems and then started chapter 13.  It’s clearly the end of the semester – students seemed tired and it was difficult to get them talking about the ideas.  I talked more than I’d like to and covered the basics of false positives and false negatives.  I drew a contingency table and this seemed familiar to some students.  We worked out the different aspects of the table using the example from the text and I think they got the idea.  As with many of our topics, there are several levels.  I’d like them to be able to understand (and build, if necessary) the table.  But I’d also like them to appreciate why this is an important concept.  I talked them through several examples to illustrate this:  drug testing of athletes, medical tests for serious illnesses, plagiarism detection software.  Still, I’m not sure how much of it sunk in.

 

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