“Two Truths and a Lie” as a Class-Participation Activity

Abstract

We adapt the social game “Two truths and a lie” to a classroom setting to give an activity that introduces principles of statistical measurement, uncertainty, prediction, and calibration, while giving students an opportunity to meet each other. We discuss how this activity can be used in a range of different statistics courses.

Keywords:

• Calibration
• Education
• Generalized linear models

Supplementary Materials

Data are at http://www.stat.columbia.edu/∼gelman/bag-of-tricks/Two/%20truths/%20and/%20a/%20lie.csv and code is at http://www.stat.columbia.edu/∼gelman/bag-of-tricks/two/_truths/_and/_a/_lie.R

Acknowledgments

We thank the students in our class for their participation and three anonymous reviewers for helpful comments.