In my course, Statistics, an Introduction, I often have many math-phobic students who quickly become disconnected from the material when distributions of random variables are explored through computational tools. I find that these students do much better and feel more confident when they can explore distributions with good ol’ pencil and paper. This is why my favorite statistics activity is my worksheet titled “Population Transformations.” In this activity, students discover the effect that linear transformations, including standardization, have on the parameters and shape of a discrete random variable. Then, based on the patterns they discover, they make conjectures about what the same transformations will do to a continuous random variable. In this talk, I will present this activity, as well as discuss my recently published workbook that contains all of my note-taking guides and activities for the course.
