Jean Pockets and T-tests

Sunday 4 July 2021

This is just a quick blog post to share something that crossed my path on twitter this week. I saw it posted by Pamela Odom with an #IBMathai hashtag. Then followed to Dr Jess Hartnett and The Pudding to this blog post and this dataset about differences in pocket sizes between Women's and Men's jeans. Hopefully that handles all the proper credits! I wont try to rewrite what is already said there, but just wanted to share what seems like an excellent opportunity for working with a relevant context and t-tests and other statistical tests in to our classrooms. It is particularly cool that the data set is being made available, since that is so often the issue with interesting articles on the Internet. Students are much more likely to find articles that present the results of enquiries than they are to find the data set that the authors used. This one seems like an excellent opportunity. Thinking about how I might approach it, I think I will want to present the data set to students and have some discussion about the questions we might ask so that we can build up to planning an investigation abd effectively simulate the process of designing an internal assessment. I'll write up anything that comes out of it here on the site. In the mean time, if you haven't seen it, have a look. Once again, I am super grateful people out there doing and sharing this stuff!