Foundational Aspects of Hypothesis Testing

You have been asked to prepare a presentation for your local middle school civics class. The students have been seeing and hearing information online about statistics and statistical significance leading up to the presidential election. They are confused about what exactly that means. 

Prepare a short presentation that explains some foundational aspects of hypothesis testing for the middle school civics class. Try to keep your explanations and examples at a level that is appropriate for this age group to understand.

Create a 5- to 7-slide Microsoft® PowerPoint® presentation and include speaker notes.

In your presentation, help the students understand the following:

• What are inferential statistics?
• What is hypothesis testing?
• What is a null and an alternative hypothesis?
• How do we talk about null and alternative hypotheses?
• What is alpha?
• What is the p value and what does it mean to be statistically significant?
• What does it mean for a result to be inferred to the population?
• What are some limitations of hypothesis testing?
• Which types of question can be answered by hypothesis testing and which cannot?