Re: [asa] An Idea for Lay Education

Louise: Rightly or wrongly this reminds me of resampling statistics
 
http://www.resample.com/content/text/index.shtml

I came across it on Julian Simon's web page, and it seemed to be empirical enough that a person with little math background could learn something about statistics from it.

I doubt that there would be a large number of individuals in any church who would have the patience and the ability to learn much of statistics. However, if a small core of people who
1) Had the ability to learn some statistics
2) Were generally considered outstanding Christians by the congregation
3) Had strong teaching ability

then we might get somewhere.

BUT: Is that the only objective we should be pursuing? (giving lay people a grasp of statistics?)
I would vote for teaching them how to think for themselves, but that's much harder.
 
Bill Hamilton
William E. Hamilton, Jr., Ph.D.
248.652.4148 (home) 248.821.8156 (mobile)
"...If God is for us, who is against us?" Rom 8:31

----- Original Message ----
From: "Freeman, Louise Margaret" <lfreeman@mbc.edu>
To: asa@calvin.edu
Sent: Thursday, April 26, 2007 8:01:45 PM
Subject: Re: [asa] An Idea for Lay Education

I decided long ago if I ever speak to high schoolers on science/faith issues I would start with
the dice central limit theorem demostration I use in my intro behavioral stats class. It forms a
nice model for a Christian who believes God is providencially in control of the individual dice
throws, yet also providing us with a mathmatical law that allows us to predict the pattern of
large numbers of throws. That same theorem is forms the basis for a large number of statistical
tests used to intepret experimental data.

__
Louise M. Freeman, PhD
Psychology Dept
Mary Baldwin College
Staunton, VA 24401
540-887-7326
FAX 540-887-7121

-----Original Message-----
From: JLR173rdNY@aol.com
To: asa@calvin.edu
Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2007 18:15:33 EDT
Subject: Re: [asa] An Idea for Lay Education

> As someone who now teaches high school math, the idea of a Sunday
> school
> program on statistics is interesting - uh, Statistics from a Christian
> Perspective? In Texas Statistics is a senior year class, taken after
> Algebra 2. The
> people who teach the class look at as part of literacy - to understand
> what
> political polls really mean - and how they can be skewed, to really be
> able to
> look at financial statistics in the newspaper - it is a lot harder to
> fool
> people who have some sense of how to handle data.
>
> Janet Rice
>
>
>
> ************************************** See what's free at
> http://www.aol.com.

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Received on Thu Apr 26 22:40:23 2007