Directions:  For your application assignments this semester, please develop a thoughtful, thorough, and original paper to address each prompt.  Please double-space your work, using Times New Roman 12-point font.  Remember that this is a formal writing assignment, and you will be graded on spelling and grammar along with content.  You may submit your papers below. Refer to your course calendar for the paper due dates.  Each paper is worth up to 40 points.  Late assignments will be accepted up to five days late, for a 10% off per day penalty.  Please do your own work! All assignments will be automatically scanned for plagiarism, and all cases with greater than a 40% match will be investigated!

Elaine Backus created a writing assignment called a meaningful paragraph, which is a piece of writing that uses all of the major concepts from a given topic to develop a complete and coherent paragraph.  The goal of this application assignment is to demonstrate your understanding of the relationship between each set of terms.  For example, below is a meaningful paragraph using the terms population, sample, data, and variable:

            Recently, psychologists have discovered a link between heart disease and depression. Researchers studied a sample of 100 adults, drawn from a population of 6,000.  Each participant contributed two pieces of data: presence of heart disease and level of depression.  Researchers also assessed additional variables such as race, gender, and age.  Findings indicated that people with heart disease were more likely to suffer from depression.

            For this application assignment, you will write two meaningful paragraphs based on the terms given below. Remember that each meaningful paragraph should be one continuous piece of writing, which uses all of the listed words and in which the sentences make sense and hang together. That is, the ideas in the paragraph illustrate that you understand the new terms in a way that allows you to write meaningfully about them. You may not simply write sequential sentences, for example, that merely define the terms; sentences must demonstrate relationships between terms (from Jordan, 2004), and must express your understanding of the material.

Terms for Meaningful Paragraph #1:

            sampling distribution, population mean, sample mean, variability, sample size, and probability.

Terms for Meaningful Paragraph #2:

            probability, Type I Error, null hypothesis, and alpha