Experience Simpson's Paradox in the Classroom

ABSTRACT

Simpson's paradox is a challenging topic to teach in an introductory statistics course. To motivate students to understand this paradox both intuitively and statistically, this article introduces several new ways to teach Simpson's paradox. We design a paper toss activity between instructors and students in class to engage students in the learning process. We show that Simpson's paradox widely exists in basketball statistics, and thus instructors may consider looking for Simpson's paradox in their own school basketball teams as examples to motivate students’ interest. A new probabilistic explanation of Simpson's paradox is provided, which helps foster students’ statistical understanding. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.

Keywords:

• In-class activity
• Necessary condition
• Simpson's paradox

Acknowledgments

The first draft of this article was completed while Jiangtao Gou was a doctoral candidate in the Department of Statistics at Northwestern University. New teaching approaches were assessed at Drexel University and Hunter College. The authors thank Bruce Spencer and Nancy Ruggeri for helpful comments, and editor Nicole Lazar, the associate editor, and two anonymous referees for their comments which helped to substantially improve the article.