The mathematical purpose of this lesson is for students to collect and use data from a simulation to compare two treatments, and to understand the importance of randomness in experimental design. Students encounter the term treatment in this lesson, which is defined as the value of the variable that is changed between the two groups in an experiment.

Students also encounter a kind of simulation that is used to analyze data from experiments. Students create a randomization distribution from the data by grouping together all of the data, randomly reassigning the data into different groups, then finding the difference between the means of these new groups. This process is repeated several times to create a distribution of the differences between the means for the treatment groups containing randomly redistributed data. The difference in means from the experiment is then compared to this randomization distribution to determine whether or not there is evidence to support the conclusion that the treatment likely causes some effect on the response variable. When students make connections between the results of the simulation and what sort of observations would be unusual if the treatment were to have no effect on the response variable, they are looking for and making use of structure (MP7).

Technology isn't required for this lesson, but there are opportunities for students to choose to use appropriate technology to solve problems. We recommend making technology available.