St. Lawrence University
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Simulating a P-value for Testing a Correlation with Fathom part of CAUSE Teaching Methods:Teaching with Data Simulations:Examples
This activity has students use Fathom to test the correlation between attendance and ballpark capacity of major league baseball teams by taking a sample of actual data and scrambling one of the variables to see how the correlation behaves when the variables are not related. After displaying the distribution of correlations for many simulated samples, students find an approximate p-value based on the number of simulations that exceed the actual correlation.