# Enriching students' conceptual understanding of confidence intervals: An interactive trivia-based classroom activity

## TL;DR

This paper introduces a quick, interactive trivia game designed to improve students' understanding of confidence intervals by addressing common misconceptions through personal perspective exposure.

## Contribution

It presents a novel, engaging classroom activity that enhances statistical literacy regarding confidence intervals, with practical integration strategies and positive preliminary results.

## Key findings

- Students showed improved interpretation of confidence intervals.
- The activity effectively addressed common misconceptions.
- The method is adaptable for various course formats.

## Abstract

Confidence intervals provide a way to determine plausible values for a population parameter. They are omnipresent in research articles involving statistical analyses. Appropriately, a key statistical literacy learning objective is the ability to interpret and understand confidence intervals in a wide range of settings. As instructors, we devote a considerable amount of time and effort to ensure that students master this topic in introductory courses and beyond. Yet, studies continue to find that confidence intervals are commonly misinterpreted and that even experts have trouble calibrating their individual confidence levels. In this article, we present a ten-minute trivia game-based activity that addresses these misconceptions by exposing students to confidence intervals from a personal perspective. We describe how the activity can be integrated into a statistics course as a one-time activity or with repetition at intervals throughout a course, discuss results of using the activity in class, and present possible extensions.