Week 13 — Hypothesis Testing: Foundations

Welcome to your Week 13 Start Here page.

Why this matters

A clinical team testing a new treatment and a teacher eyeing a suspicious quiz score ask the same question: if nothing special were going on, how surprising would these data be?

In plain language

A student hands in a 10-question quiz with 4 choices per question, scores 7, and tells you they guessed on every question. Should you believe them? This week you learn a hypothesis test (a way to check a claim by asking how surprising the data would be if the claim were true) and its main output, the p-value (the chance of a result at least this extreme if the boring explanation were true). You will learn to say exactly what that number means and what it does not mean. You will also learn the two ways a test can go wrong, and why a "significant" result is not always an important one.

• Already covered: Weeks 1 to 12 built description, probability, sampling distributions, and confidence intervals.
• This week: hypotheses, p-values, significance levels, and Type I and Type II errors.
• How they connect: an interval estimates a parameter; a test checks one claimed value of it.
• Where we're going next: Week 14 runs full tests for means and proportions.

Focus

How surprising would your data be if the boring explanation were true?

By the end of this module, you should be able to:

• [ ] write a null and an alternative hypothesis
• [ ] find and interpret a p-value from the guessing-quiz table
• [ ] decide with α and name Type I and Type II errors
• [ ] tell statistical from practical significance

To-do

Plan your week

1. Read Chapter 13 (about 50 minutes), then the lecture and slides.
2. Work the lecture tutorial (60–90 minutes) and the practice set (about 20 minutes).
3. Do the Data Lab (about 90 minutes), the discussion, and the assignment.
4. Take the quiz.

This week's checkpoint: find the p-value for a claimed guesser who scored 7 of 10 and state it in one correct sentence.

You've got this

Start every p-value sentence with "if the null were true", and ask your instructor early if a step snags.

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