Age Guessing: A Game to Introduce Fundamental Statistical Concepts
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We develop a spreadsheet-based game to illustrate fundamental statistical concepts in the first class of an undergraduate Statistics course to motivate students about the topics that they will learn in upcoming classes.This game has been implemented by Google Forms and Google Sheets and can be played in both online and in-person classes of small and large sizes.Statistics is one of the most anxiety-inducing courses for undergraduate students, especially if mathematics is not the focus of their program.Negative anecdotes about the course, mathematics anxiety, and not knowing what the course is exactly about and how practical it can be are among the reasons that contribute to statistics anxiety.The first class provides a good opportunity for an instructor to mitigate these negative impressions and to set a positive attitude toward the course.A pre-and post-game group discussion that we have conducted systematically for six years suggests that the game addresses the students'negative impression about the course and helps them gain a clearer understanding of the tools and skills they will learn in Statistics.Supplementary materials for this article are available online.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.017 | 0.004 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".