Psychology Students Conduct ‘Sweet’ Sampling Experiment

During Mrs. Amy Peavey’s Psychology class, students got to conduct a hands-on ‘sweet’ and ‘tasty’ demonstration of Sampling. Each student received a small package of plain Skittles and quantifies the sample by color. Students use their data to hypothesize the population’s color distribution. By pooling samples, students were able to achieve closer approximations of the population distribution. 

Here is how the experiment broke down:

  • Predict what color Skittles will be in your bag.
  • Choose an ‘intact random sample’ from the population of samples.
  • Make a simple frequency distribution of the five Skittles colors (red, orange, yellow, green, and purple) on a datasheet. 
  • Convert raw data to percentages. 
  • Generate a hypothesis about the distribution of Skittle colors in the population on the basis of your sample, form pairs to pool data and generate a joint hypothesis, and pool data for the entire class to generate an overall hypothesis. 

“It's always fun to have students take an active part in their learning and foster their critical thinking skills at the same time. It certainly helps that students were looking forward to consuming their “subjects” as soon as our data collection was complete,” said Mrs. Peavey. 

Psychology Skittle Project
Psychology Skittle Project
Psychology Skittle Project
Psychology Skittle Project
Psychology Skittle Project
Psychology Skittle Project
Psychology Skittle Project
Psychology Skittle Project
Psychology Skittle Project
Psychology Skittle Project

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