Intro Stats Students Need Both Confidence and Tolerance (Intervals)

摘要

Tolerance intervals are typically not taught in introductory statistics courses aimed at business, engineering, and science majors. This is regrettable, since students are likely to encounter practical problems that should be analyzed using tolerance intervals. Additionally, contrasting tolerance intervals against confidence intervals will improve students' understanding of confidence intervals, eliminating frequent confusions. In this article, we make the argument for teaching tolerance intervals in introductory statistics courses, and we offer suggestions about what to teach.