A SCORE Module for Inference Review based on NFL Scores and Point Spreads

Music City Center 

An important skill for introductory statistics students who have been introduced to several inference procedures (e.g. confidence intervals and tests for means, proportions, paired data, two sample situations, and/or correlations) is to confidently identify which procedure is appropriate for a given question and data situation. The SCORE network (https://scorenetwork.org) provides a repository of datasets and teaching modules based on sports examples and one of the modules includes materials for a general review of many of the inference topics encountered in an introductory statistics course. The goal Is to present students with a series of questions on a common theme that each require a different inference procedure to address. For example, "Is the average home field advantage in football really about 3 points?" or "How often does the favored team win a game?". As a quick in-class review students can simply be asked to identify the appropriate procedure, but we also provide the data (in this case all scores and point spreads for a full NFL season) so that students could also be asked to do the full analysis to answer some (or all) of the questions.

inference review

sports data

football 

Section on Statistics and Data Science Education