An Interactive Excel VBA Example for Teaching Statistics Concepts

INFORMS Transactions on Education

Don G. Wardell¹  Weiyu Tsai¹ 

[1] David Eccles School of Business, University of Utah, 1645 E. Campus Center Dr. #106, Salt Lake City, Utah 84112

关键词: Central Limit Theorem;    interval estimation;    hypothesis testing;    random sampling techniques;    Excel VBA;    teaching statistics;   

DOI  :  10.1287/ited.7.1.125

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: INFORMS

【 摘 要 】

It is often challenging for business students to learn abstract statistical concepts and apply these concepts to their work. Three concepts in particular that we have found difficult to communicate effectively are the Central Limit Theorem, interval estimation and hypothesis testing. To improve the effectiveness of teaching these fundamental statistical concepts, we developed a Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) driven Excel spreadsheet that is built around one simple business scenario. The scenario involves setting the filling speed in a cereal filling plant. The faster the filling speed, the larger the variation in cereal box weights and the higher the chance of having an out-of-control filling process. On the other hand, the lower the filling speed, the less efficient the plant is at utilizing capacity. Through interactively finding the optimal filling speed, students are exposed to these key statistics concepts as well as random sampling techniques. Hence, we integrate the illustration of three impor...

【 授权许可】

CC BY