Surprise—they're different! An introductory statistics activity to highlight differences between Frequentist and Bayesian statistics

Oregon Convention Center 

We present an activity for an introductory statistics course that illuminates the differences between Frequentist and Bayesian approaches. The activity has students analyze a dataset related to social inequality and discover interesting trends—with a surprise at the end. Different student groups will come to different conclusions, which will require them to grapple with the differences between Frequentist and Bayesian approaches. We briefly describe the intervention and report results from a pilot run of the activity.